Annotation

1.0 v41

Score audio, video or the real world.

Annotation is an easy to use application that allows you to code events in terms of their type, onset, and duration. You can use Annotation not only to generate organized audio or video clips but also to extract complex event structures and then analyze them using your favorite statistics software. In addition, Annotation’s interface helps you spot patterns by graphically visualizing your data. Annotation is very flexible: it was built for labs at major research institutions but is already also being used by focus groups, human and animal behavior labs, a variety of training environments ranging from nursing to sports coaching, as well as several smaller niches.

Annotation has been localized for English and French.

Requires Mac OS X 10.4

At a glance:

You can code events as they unfold in real time. Or if you have multimedia you don’t want to load onto your computer you can code it off a TV monitor or stereo.

With AV mode, if you have audio or video that plays in QuickTime, you can load it directly into Annotation, allowing you to pause, scrub and seek through your timeline together with the media.

Event data can be exported to CSV, which means you can then load it in a popular stats or spreadsheet app such as Excel, Stata, or SPSS.

If you’ve loaded your media into Annotation you can export your event data as media clips. Clips can be references or standalone files.

Annotation gives you great temporal accuracy. In AV mode you get frame or sample level accuracy. In realtime mode Annotation works within 1/100th of a second -- far faster than human response time.

If you’re coding audio or video Annotation can display the audio amplitude waveform together with your event data.

Not only can you add notes to any event but they’ll be exported in your CSV file as just another column together with the rest of your event data.

If you use the same setup over and over, you’ll appreciate the ability to create custom templates for your projects. Make as many templates as you like and every time you create a new document you’ll be able to use one of your templates as the starting point.

Annotation has a convenient keyboard accessible way of adjusting playback rate, direction, and stepping -- particularly useful when you’re doing frame by frame analysis.

Seeking and scrubbing is a snap. Use a horizontally enabled scroll ball such as the one on Apple’s Mighty Mouse or a compatible jog shuttle to navigate through your data. You can also use the standard scroll bar.

Annotation lets you zoom in to get a detailed view of your data or zoom out to get a bird’s eye view.

Made a mistake? Not a problem. You can always go back, recode any events you missed, delete events you didn’t mean to enter and change both the start and end times of any event.