iDictate – Digital Voice Blog

This has to be one of the most common questions we get in the Dictate Australia office. Do you want the good news or the bad news? I will start with the bad news:

At the time of writing this blog NO you can not play .ds2 (also known as DSS Pro, DSS stands for Digital Speech Standard) files in Express Scribe from NCH. I don’t envisage this changing in the near future either, the codec for the .ds2 file format is proprietary unlike .mp3 which is a free for all. Companies like Olympus and Philips spent good money developing this high quality, small size digital audio format and rightly don’t want to give that IP away to just anybody. Of course I am sure that if you want to buy a licence to process these files then you probably can but why would NCH spend large amounts of cash to add an extra audio file format to their massively popular free transcription software, Express Scribe. Hat’s off to NCH, Express Scribe is amazing software for $0 and I have long said that they should charge for it – alot of people would happily pay.

Now that you are feeling demoralised, depressed and the fear of actually having to spend some money is looming largely over you here comes the good news, there are ways around this. This solution varies greatly depending on which operating system the transcriber has, the operating system the person who owns the digital voice recorder which is generating the .ds2 audio file has and the software which came with the digital voice recorder. For example the Olympus DS-2400 comes with DSS Player Standard (for Windows) whereas the Olympus DS-3400 and DS-5000 come with DSS Player Pro (for Windows), the Pro and the Standard software have different functionality.

I have tried to cover all scenarios in an earlier blog post titled:

Options For Playing .ds2 (DSS Pro) Audio Files if you use Express Scribe or Older Olympus Transcription Kits

If after reading that earlier post you are still not sure of your best option please feel free to comment with your question or concern and we will happily help you out.

MacSpeech Scribe just released by MacSpeech lets Mac users record their voice to a digital voice recorder and then have MacSpeech Scribe transcribe it for them. The only certified digital recording devices for MacSpeech Scribe are the iPhone, iPod Touch (2G+ plus a mic) and some of the Olympus digital voice recorders.

Two of the Olympus digital voice recorders certified for use with MacSpeech Scribe are the Olympus DS-3400 and DS-5000, both from the Professional series of digital dictaphones from Olympus, these are serious digital dictaphones. They both come with DSS Player Version 7 Plus for Mac which simplifies the task of getting the audio off the recorder. The software lets you also setup users on the recorder, set noise cancelation levels, playback and edit your recorded dictation and direct record using your digital dictaphone as a high quality mic.

Out of the box both the DS-3400 and DS-5000 will record in DSS Pro digital audio format, these files have a suffix of .ds2 – files of this format can not be loaded into MacSpeech Scribe so some file conversion needs to take place, this is where DSS Player Version 7 Plus can help. On a Mac it is not possible to set the DS-3400/DS-5000 to record in .aif format by default.

For file conversion you have two options. 1. you can manually convert each file 2. you can set DSS Player Plus to automatically convert audio every time your DS-3400/DS-5000 is connected. Both are very simple:

Manually Convert DS-3400/DS-5000 Audio To .aif Format

To manually convert .ds2 audio files to .aif on a Mac using DSS Player Version 7 Plus simply right-click on the .ds2 file you want to convert and select Convert to AIFF File, your converted file will be placed in the same download folder tray as the original file. If you want to save the .aif file to an alternative location simply highlight the audio file to be converted and click the Convert to AIFF File icon .

Automatically Convert DS-3400/DS-5000 Audio When The Recorder Is Docked

If you prefer to convert every audio file during download to your Mac when your digital dictaphone is connected then open the DSS Player Preferences and click the Download tab. Here you can tick “Convert to AIFF file during download” which will have the desired affect. Your .aif files will appear in the download tray folder configured and are then ready to be loaded into MacSpeech Scribe.