Student Guide to Sonocent Audio Notetaker

 
Student Guide to Sonocent Audio Notetaker  
 
Student Guide to Sonocent Audio Notetaker 
Welcome to Sonocent! 
Starting a New Project 
Recording Audio 
Recording from your computer’s speakers 
Importing Audio 
Importing from a digital recorder: 
Importing from your computer: 
Audio Notetaker Panes 
Working with Audio 
Syncing Slides or Images to Audio 
Highlighting and Formatting Audio 
Editing Audio 
Annotating Audio 
In the text and reference panes, you may type notes, copy/paste text and add links to 
websites. You can copy and paste files into here to create hyperlinks.　 
Change the color, size, font and use bold, italic and underline. 
Reading Annotations Aloud 
Clean Audio & Scrub Background Noise 
How to Create Study Guides 
Staying Organized on Sonocent 
Reviewing and Exporting a Project 
 
 
 
 
 
1 

Welcome to Sonocent!

This program allows you to get the most out of your classes and lectures, making it easy to

bring together your information and ideas by working with audio. With Sonocent, you don’t have

to worry about missing anything during lectures and meetings because you are able to record

them. In doing so, you can highlight important sections of audio and annotate in real time.

Additionally, you can mark parts of the sections you want to review later or use the highlighted

audio to make study guides.

Once you have installed and activated Sonocent, If you have questions or just want to explore,

you can find plenty of information in the skills portal and the interactive tutorial found under

the “New Project” homepage. Using interactive videos, the site will walk you through all the

capabilities of the program for recording, playback, note-taking, using the app on an IOS tablet,

etc.

This guide will also help walk you through the most useful features of Sonocent.

Starting a New Project

Projects are lectures or audio sections that you will record and manipulate. To start a new

project, begin at the “home” tab.

● If you do not have slides to begin with, select “blank project.”

● If you have slides for the lecture, import them before or after by selecting “import slides”,

or by clicking “import” at the top of your new project.

● Once the slides are imported, you can add audio by importing or recording a live lecture.

Recording Audio

You can record audio from three potential sources: live recording, recording using your

computer’s speakers, and importing audio. Please refer to the Importing Audio section for more

information.

● Live recording captures sound coming into your computer’s microphone.

● Recording from your speakers captures any audio coming into your computer from

videos, webinars, or video conferencing, such as online lectures. To select whether to

record from microphone, speaker, or both, click the dropdown menu under the record

button.

Recording from your computer’s speakers

When the lecture begins, click the red “record” button.

Importing Audio

In Sonocent, you can import Audio from many sources. In this section, we will go over how to

import audio from three common sources: from the Sonocent Recorder App, from a digital

recorder and from your computer.

Importing from the Sonocent Recorder App:

1) Download the Sonocent Link(Reader) app from the app store.

2) Open the Sonocent Recorder App and press the Transfer button on the top right.

3) You will be taken to the app’s transfer page, showing a four digit code.

4) Open Audio Notetaker. Hit the transfer tab on the left and click on “Transfer from

Sonocent Recorder. This will take you straight to the Portable Device Manager.

5) After a few seconds, your device will show up in the left pane marker “Device.” Click on

your device and enter the 4 digit code from the Sonocent Recorder App. When

connected, you will see all the files on your device available. Click the file you want to

import.

*If you don’t see your device, make sure that your device is on the same wifi as your computer.

Also, Apple Bonjour or iTunes must be installed on your computer. If you updated your mac ios

to Catalina, rather than using itunes, you can access your device through Finder. Just connect

your device to the computer, hit Finder to sync. Then hit Files at the top and select Sonocent

Link and click the file you want to import.

Importing from a digital recorder:

If you have used a digital recorder to record audio, you will need to transfer the audio files to

your computer, using the manufacturer's recommended process. Once the audio files have

been transferred, you can import them to either an existing project or a new project. To do this,

simply, hit the “import” button on the toolbar.

Importing from your computer:

To add audio to a new project, from the home tab, select New Project on the left side of the

panel and hit Import Audio. Select the audio file you want to import and a new project with the

selected audio will be created.

To add audio to an existing project, click the import button and select Import Audio to browse

and select the desired audio file.

You can import multiple files. Just remember to select all the files you want to import. A

progres bar will be shown to show how much of the import has been completed.

Audio Notetaker Panes

Audio Notetaker displays information in four interactive columns called panes: images,

reference, text and audio. When active, the pane header will be blue. This means the keyboard

shortcuts are for actions taken in this pane.

There are 4 panes:

1. Images

2. Reference

3. Text

4. Audio

Image pane is where your pdf/ppt slides will be imported. Reference and text panes allow

you to add text annotations.

The audio pane is where the audio recording is converted to “audio chunks,” which look like

this:

-When going over your notes, it is useful to have all four layers of notetaking open, especially

when you are editing. To do so, make sure all four of these boxes are highlighted green.

The sidebar down the right-hand side changes depending on which pane is active.

Resize the panes by dragging the edges left and right.

Working with Audio

After the audio from your lecture is recorded, Sonocent has many functions to help you keep

information organized and working for you.

For Playback controls, use the toolbar buttons to control playback, or click in the audio and

press SPACE.

Syncing Slides or Images to Audio

While recording or playing, simply press the enter key or the “section” button at the top of the

page when the professor moves onto the next slide. This will sync audio sections to each slide

or image in the image pane.

Highlighting and Formatting Audio

Sonocent allows you to manipulate color code audio just like written notes. In the

audio panel, when you highlight parts of the audio within a section, a menu of colors

will appear on the right hand side of the screen. You can choose to color code

different parts of a section using “audio colors” or choose to color an entire section

using “section colors”. If you want to create your own color code, you can hit the

green button, “edit color key.”

Next to these colors, you will also see numbers. These are your shortcuts. For example, while

recording, you can press “Ctrl+1” to start highlighting important information.

The Audio Pane must be active in order to use single button shortcuts (1-5 For Chunk coloring

[0 to return to default] 6-9 for Section coloring).

Editing Audio

You can right-click on chunks to cut/copy/paste/delete, select chunks and drag them around to

move them, and you can split and merge chunks. All these options can be found on the sidebar.

Annotating Audio

In the text and reference panes, you may type notes, copy/paste text and add links to websites.

You can copy and paste files into here to create hyperlinks.　

Change the color, size, font and use bold, italic



and underline.

Reading Annotations Aloud

If you want Sonocent to read aloud your annotations in the text pane, select the text you want to

hear, and click the “speak” button in the menu at the top of your screen. If you click the

dropdown under “speak,” it will give the option to read aloud all your text.

If you use Dragon Software:

Use Scribe to activate Dragon NaturallySpeaking and transcribe your audio recordings.

Clean Audio & Scrub Background Noise

If the audio is not clear, you can adjust the voice quality.

Click “audio clean up” at the top center of your screen, and

select your action from the dropdown menu.

“Click Reduction” minimizes any typing noises picked up in

your recording.

“Noise Cancellation” cancels background noise picked up in

your recording.

How to Create Study Guides

You can extract the different colors of audio to create task lists, study guides, review questions

or anything else.

● Click “Extract” at the top, and select “extract audio.” This will start a new project using

just the extracted audio.

● Choose what type of information you want to isolate. For example if you want a list of

tasks from your professor, deselect all the colors except green, extract, and save the

new project as a “To-Do List for Course X 4/1/20”

In this window, only “review” color audio has been extracted, notes are written in the text section

alongside the audio, and references where needed. These sections of audio marked for review

have become a useful study guide.

Staying Organized on Sonocent

Remember to label and save each lecture with the name of the class and

date. Example: MATH BC1010 3/26/20. You can do this by clicking the pink

edit symbol at the top right corner and entering the details. You can organize

your projects by clicking the green file symbol at the top left corner, and

selecting “manage.” To save a project to your computer, click the “save as”

button from the same dropdown menu, naming it as above, and locating it

somewhere you can easily find, such as a file for your class.

Reviewing and Exporting a Project

If you want to view a project without the distraction of the toolbar, click the “Presentation mode

icon in the bottom left, for full-screen audio playback with images and annotations.

Click the “x” to exit this view.

To use your project elsewhere, click on the Export button and choose what you want to export: