Listen N Write Free Editor's Review

Quickly transcribe lectures and audio conferences with this handy Windows app.


Being a college student isn’t easy. Life expands exponentially after high school graduation, and many students are caught unaware of the changes in  academic expectations.  When it comes to taking notes in large lecture halls during your college career, it’s easy to miss important points while trying to copy down something your professor just said. This is one of the reasons why applications like Listen N Write Free are important to have. It’s a transcription app for your Windows machine, and it’s a must have.

One of the biggest things that college freshman have to adjust to is the college lecture. You don’t necessarily have any guarantee that what is lectured on is actually relevant course material, but in many cases, it is; and you’re going to need to memorize it and perhaps recall it for an exam.  It’s for this reason that students, and even conference attendees, or lawyers – basically anyone who has to transcribe recorded audio – should try Listen N Write, It’s a free tool designed for transcription.

Interestingly enough, LnW doesn't use speech recognition or automatic transcription. The app is a media player bundled with a text editor. However, don’t stop reading yet. The media player has subtle but clever differences that make it a great tool for playing back recorded lectures and speeches and writing down what you hear. Its skip arrows move the recording forward or back by just a few seconds, ending the ever-so-frustrating back-and-forth as you try to zero in on a single word or short phrase. When you hit the Pause button, Listen N Write's media player reverses the recording by one second, which helps keep words from being truncated or garbled during playback-pause-playback activities.

Listen N Write's interface consists of three pieces: the media player and the optional text editor and a bookmarks box.  Only the media player and text editor open by default. You can hide or show the bookmarks and text editor via the media player's View menu.  The rest of the menu bar's entries should be familiar to most users.

The media player itself is extremely simple, just a file title field, an Open File icon, playback controls, a volume slider, and a progress bar. The Text Editor has the usual toolbar full of controls. The Bookmarks box is simple.

App Pro’s: Advanced playback controls to catch key phrases from within your recorded lecture

App Con’s: No speech recognition tools. Transcription is completely manual.

Conclusion: The app is easy enough to use. The pause button pulls the recording back a full second so you really won’t miss anything.  The biggest problem I have with a tool like this is that it doesn’t use speech recognition to automate the transcription. You have to do it all by hand, which was totally NOT cool.