The Transcribe! application is an assistant for people who sometimes want to work out a piece of music from a recording, in order to write it out, or play it themselves, or both. It doesn't do the transcribing for you, but it is essentially a specialised player program which is optimised for the purpose of transcription. It has many transcription-specific features not found on conventional music players.

The English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) is one of the most well-known works on English pronunciation. Its first edition, published in 1917 and written by Daniel Jones, used symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the pronunciations of English words. This system of transcription was further improved by A. C. Gimson in the 13th edition of the EPD (published 1967). Gimson's system is now used by nearly all English dictionaries published in the UK, including those from Oxford, Longman and Collins.