XTrans

Spec sheet

Purpose

XTrans is a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel tool for manual transcription and annotation of audio recordings.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Intended users

LDC describes XTrans as designed for high-quality, high-volume transcription tasks involving real-world data.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Free plan

YesRead 23 Sep 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Audio formats

Supported audio formats include .sph, .wav, .aiff, .flac, and .ogg.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Audio segmentation

It supports segmenting audio into smaller units such as turns and sentences, speaker identification, orthographic transcription, and transcript structure labeling.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Export formats

Tab-delimited format (TDF)Read 23 Sep 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Language support

XTrans supports bidirectional text input for languages including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Hebrew, and is Unicode compliant.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

License and availability

XTrans is free, and its Linux and Windows releases are under GPLv3.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Overlapping speakers

Virtual Speaker Channels let users associate many speakers or sound sources with the same audio channel.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Quality control

The interface includes quality-control functions, including speaker identification and segment labels.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Simultaneous recordings

Users can open an effectively unlimited number of audio files for simultaneous transcription.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Speaker identification

YesRead 23 Sep 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Technology

XTrans components are written in Python and C++ and use LDC’s QWave waveform display module.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Timestamp support

YesRead 23 Sep 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Transcript formats

XTrans outputs tab-delimited TDF transcripts and directly imports some XML formats, including Transcriber TRS.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Use in research

LDC reports that it and its government, academic, and industrial partners used XTrans to create more than 3,500 hours of time-aligned verbatim transcripts.Read 11 Oct 2026 · ldc.upenn.edu

Plans and prices

Every XTrans plan and price →

Where Specifiction places it

• AI transcription tools#35 of 467.5
• Transcription Software#39 of 467.3