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System Requirements

A Linux x86 machine running GTK 3
GStreamer 1.2.4 or later
A colour display screen with a resolution of at least 800 * 600
A sound card.
Transcribe! is also available for Windows and Mac, see the Seventh String website www.seventhstring.com

Transcribe! is available for Linux in separate 32-bit and 64-bit builds, so make sure you download the appropriate one for your OS.

Installing Transcribe!

Transcribe! is not open source. It has been available for Windows and Mac for some years as a commercial application and, as usual for those platforms, is closed-source. I realise that distribution for Linux would be easier as open source, but that would be a very major policy change for me. The source is more than 90% shared between platforms so releasing source for one platform effectively means releasing them all. I am hoping to be able to support the commonest Linux configurations with this binary distribution and certainly I am willing to try to extend the range of supported configurations. But I am unlikely to be interested in making heroic efforts, or releasing the source, in order to support some configuration used by only a small proportion of Linux users, which is itself only a tiny proportion of the desktop market.

Transcribe! for Linux/x86/GTK is distributed as xscsetup.tar.gz When you unpack it (tar -xzf xscsetup.tar.gz) you will find:
- transcribe : the executable.
- xschelp.htb : the Help content.
- readme_gtk.html : this file.
- libgstvideosection.so : a GStreamer plugin, see http://www.seventhstring.com/resources/gstreamer.html
- gtkicons : a folder containing some icons.

If you are running a reasonably recent Linux distribution then you should be able to say "transcribe" and it works. If not then most likely the loader reported a problem with library versions - see "Fixing Problems With Libraries And Versions" below. If there was some other problem then do let me know, also let me know if the advice below doesn't help.

If Transcribe! won't launch
The first thing is to try launching it from a console (instead of double-clicking it in a file browser).
Attempting to run the 32 bit version on a 64 bit OS may well get you a message something like "bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory", while attempting to run the 64 bit version on a 32 bit OS might get you "cannot execute binary file".
If Linux itself has errors to report about Transcribe! or anything else, then you may be able to see error messages as follows:
Open a root console and type "tail -f /var/log/messages"
Also use the command-line option "-v" when you launch Transcribe!. This will cause messages to appear on the console from which you launch Transcribe!.

Note about Help
Transcribe! will launch a separate process for viewing the Help, and the Help content itself is in a file called xschelp.htb. By default Transcribe! will look for the help file by looking in the same place as the app executable.
If this isn't working - for instance if you want to have the executable and the Help files in different places - then you can specify a location for the Help file, by making an entry in Transcribe!'s Preferences file ~/.Transcribe!7
In the "[General_U]" section, add a line
HelpFolder=<full path to folder containing Help file>
This path should begin and end with a slash, for instance:
HelpFolder=/home/andy/Transcribe/

Note that the System Info command (Help menu) will tell you where Transcribe! is looking for the Help file.

Note that if you do edit your Preferences manually then you should do it while Transcribe! is not running. Otherwise when you exit Transcribe! it will save its preferences, which will erase any manual edits you made.

Another way of reading the Help is this. xschelp.htb is really a zip file containing html pages. So you can rename and unzip (cp xschelp.htb xschelp.zip, unzip xschelp.zip) and then use any html browser to view the Help.

Note about GStreamer and Sound Cards
If Transcribe! fails to output sound for some reason, you will find this discussed in the Help - Troubleshooting.

Note about the <alt> key
Transcribe! interprets the GDK_MOD1_MASK as being the <alt> key. This is the usual setup for Linux but if your system (the modifier mapping of the X server) is set up differently then you will need to use whichever key does produce GDK_MOD1_MASK as <alt> as far as Transcribe! is concerned.

Fixing Problems With Libraries And Versions
The command "objdump -x transcribe | grep NEEDED" will list the libraries directly linked to by Transcribe!, and the command "ldd transcribe" will reveal what libraries and versions Transcribe! needs, and what it is finding (or not finding). You may need to install or update some libraries to get it to run. Let me know if you run into trouble and I will try to help, though I am not a Linux expert.

If You Want To Uninstall Transcribe!

Simply delete the transcribe directory from wherever you put it.