How to adjust subtitle timings

Each subtitle has its start and end time. These specify when and for how long the caption appears over the video. When editing subtitles in our editor, you can simply adjust their timings either with your mouse or directly from the keyboard. First, you need to enter into the editing mode. This can be achieved by several ways:

• double click on the subtitle caption
• double click on the audio waveform segment
• CTRL + click on the subtitle caption
• CTRL + I -  to edit the currently played caption
• TAB or SHIFT+TAB - to edit the next or previous caption

Now, as you are in the editing mode, you can change the subtitle caption and its start and end time. The currently edited subtitle is marked with a light-blue background color.

• ALT + Left - shift caption start time by -0.1s
• ALT + Right - shift caption start time by +0.1s
• ALT + Up - shift caption end time by +0.1s
• ALT + Down  - shift caption end time by -0.1s

On the left in the editor, there is an audio waveform with segments that represent duration of particular subtitles. You can easily adjust subtitle duration by holding down the mouse left button and dragging the segment borders. The audio waveform can significantly help you to define the segment beginning and end because moments with no speech/sound in the audio look like a straight line.

Interactive waveform with Outwave.js

Outwave.js is a handy library that can render audio waveform in a web browser. Its development was also supported by SpokenData. Apart from that, this library has a great extension for displaying annotation segments directly on the waveform. The segments can be easily added, deleted, merged or split. By and large, we really needed such a library.

Therefore, we are happy to announce that Outwave.js was integrated into the SpokenData subtitles editor. From now on, our users will more easily define speech or non-speech segments just by dragging the segment boundaries on the waveform with the mouse button held down.

We are certain you will benefit from the Outwave library as we do. The fastest way to test our new feature is to start the SpokenData demo and edit any recording subtitles.