At the law firm I support we have to deal with a lot of Mac vs Windows issues. Most courts provide certain files in a Windows-only format or in order to access public court information you must have a Windows computer running IE. This is the fault of resellers and lazy coders. Well, that is my opinion developed from 20+ years of dealing with these issues. At the firm we have not found a shortcut that has allowed us to bypass Windows and deal with the court audio in a purely Mac form. I will outline what we do, what you need, and a few things we haven’t yet tested.
First and foremost is that the FTR recordings are in a proprietary Windows only format. They look and smell like WAV files but they are not. This fact drives everything else.
You need to use one of the players from FTR, there are both free and paid ones, we use the free ones.
But these only run in Windows. We have Parallels so we use that along with Windows 7 and this way we can run them on our Macs. There are other ways you could do this:
Try WINE, its a way to run Windows apps without installing Windows. We haven’t tested this so no idea if it will work but it works for some things that we have tested.
Try a free virtual machine (VM) like VirtualBox, VMWare (free version), there may be a few others
OR simply buy a cheap PC laptop because the Windows license itself is about $150 – $250. So by the time you add $99 for Parallels and $250 for Windows 7 you are halfway to $500 for last years hot laptop (now on sale…)
Once you have done the above – either bought a PC laptop or set up a virtual machine, installed Windows 7/8, and then FTR you can now listen to and then export your files.
The FTR add-on allows us to export to a true standard WAV format audio, we go one step further and convert the files to MP3 and provide both to our attorneys. Both formats work well but the WAV files have the disadvantage on the Mac of forgetting where you stopped last time while the MP3 will remember your place from last time (this isn’t really a flaw in the format but with the free players we use).
The WAV to MP3 conversion tool we use is free: All2MP3 (set the encoding to low quality since you’re not encoding music the high quality option does nothing for the audio which is all spoken word)
I forgot something. I’m leaving out the best part…FTR doesn’t standardize internally. This means that even FTR has different formats within their proprietary software. Keep in mind that this software is sold through resellers so there are all kinds of little add ons that the resellers sells to each court/state/county/judge. There are video formats, formats with different file extensions but they are actually still just WAV files, and the list goes on. Some recordings will have an audio transcript linked or just an audio log which tells you when and where the recording(s) were made.
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Apple TV price is the same: $99
Apple ...
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I am trying to mount my wife’s laptop hard drive on my mac to transfer over some ...
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I’ve got a friend who’s a network admin with an insurance company, and her folks are having ...
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