Trebble is the name of a nifty web audio app that lets you not just edit but augment recordings in your browser. It works best in Chrome. You upload spoken text, which is automatically transcribed (and, yes, is prone to error — and yes, we’re being trained by our speech-to-text tools to enunciate with greater precision, and yes, I do find new reasons to rewatch Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation pretty much every day in our ever more increasingly technologically mediated world). You can then — magically, as it were — edit the audio by editing the text. That is: If you want to remove a clause from the audio, you either cut it or instruct Trebble to ignore it. You can also remove noise and — this is pretty cool — add music to select moments within the track. And when you’re satisfied with the result, you can output the recording for subsequent use, with all the edits and other augmentations in place. Trebble is clearly still in beta. The interface reminds me a bit of what you can do in rev.com’s transcription service, but the editing and enhancement is something else entirely. It’s still early going for Trebble, but the user experience provides an upstream view of what’s ahead. Tools like this quite quickly go from web novelties to universal norms. (Found via the always excellent webaudioweekly.com.)
Try it out at trebble.fm