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I have a corpus of recorded interviews and would like know what Windows 7 software (preferably commercial because it will be bought by administration of my institution, which is a bit reluctant to free software) is best suited for the following:

while listening to the sound (if possible at a slower progression rate) either click with the mouse, or press a keyboard key, to introduce a mark on the fly. The marks should be retrievable as a list of labels and timestamps.

My need for placing the mark is to timestamp the moment when the speaker changes (there are always only two speakers), and it should be as precise as possible.

If possible, the mark should be displayed on the spectrogram and it should contain the value of an integer variable, automatically incremented for each new mark placed (this is not absolutely necessary, but useful because while placing the marks I have a transcribed version of the interview before my eyes and in this transcribed version I have speaker changes numbered).

I have done this already using Amadeus Lite on the Mac and listening to the interview at 50% of the normal speed. It worked more-or-less well because Amadeus asks for the mark label contents with a dialog which I had to dismiss and this made me stop very often, go back, and repair the mark. No somebody else will work on this corpus, using a Windows machine.

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    Probably most of the pro DAWs can do this - Cubase Help pages, markers chapter
    – Tetsujin
    Mar 27, 2020 at 13:04
  • nuendo markers are a bit clunky, but doable. problem is your O/S - most apps now are only 64 bit.
    – Mark
    Mar 27, 2020 at 14:12
  • Well it is a Windows 7 Entreprise 64 bits (6.1, version 7601), CPU G2020 @ 2.90 Ghz (2 CPUs), 8192MB RAM
    – yannis
    Mar 27, 2020 at 18:21
  • @Tetsujin, I went to the Cubase Help pages, it says how to create a marker track, but it doesn't say how to create markers. Can it be done on-the-fly while sound is playing?
    – yannis
    Mar 27, 2020 at 18:29
  • Yes. I gave you the link to the entire manual.
    – Tetsujin
    Mar 27, 2020 at 18:42

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Pretty much any DAW or audio editor will let you insert markers on the fly during playback, and you can reposition them with sample accuracy. Off the top: Reaper, Ableton Live, Wavelab, Nuendo, ProTools, Adobe Audition, probably Audacity. Some programs make working with markers a pleasure, others are more awkward.

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