What's New in Transana 2.40?

• Transana now supports multiple simultaneous media files. You can load up to 4 media files in a single Episode. Once you have synchronized the files, they work together. See "Working with Multiple Media Files" in the Manual for more information.
  
  
• Transana no longer uses the media player control bar provided by the media player. Instead, I have added a very simple media control bar to the Video window. This new media control bar can control multiple media sources simultaneously. In addition, this allows playback speed changes to work when playback is being controlled from the Video window.
  
  
• I added Quick Searches. If you right-click a keyword and select "Quick Search", Transana will do a search for that keyword and will place the results in the Search node of the Database Tree.
  
  
• You can now select "Play All Clips" from a Search Results node and this will play all clips from all collections in the Search Result. It used to be that if a Search returned results from several root Collections, you couldn't play all the clips in one Play All Clips operation.
  
  
• I added a Text Search control in all of Transana's text-based reports.
  
  
• I changed the default configuration of the Episode and Collection reports so that these reports now include clip transcripts by default. (Thanks Nicolas.)
  
  
• I reworked the meaning of double-clicking in the Data window's Database Tree. The main result is that Clips and Quick Clips are easier than ever to create.
  • If a tree node can be expanded, double-clicking will expand it.
  • If the node is a Transcript, a Clip, or a Note, the appropriate object is loaded in Transana's main interface.
  • If the node is a Collection, a Clip is added if possible.
  • If the node is a Keyword, a Quick Clip is added if possible.
    
    
• When playback speed can be changed, it is now possible to change playback speed using Ctrl-(comma) to reduce playback speed and Ctrl-(period) to increase playback speed. The Transcript Window or Visualization Window must be selected for this to work. (Playback speed functionality depends upon media type and media player selection on Windows. It is always available on OS X.)
  
  
• When you use Presentation Mode, the size of the type in your transcripts is now automatically enlarged to make it more visible to your audience.
  
  
• At the request of the participants in the 2008 summer training workshop, I added a new Presentation Mode called "Audio and Transcript Only". This mode should be useful for conference presentations where you want to play your clip audio without showing the associated video.
  
  
• Transitions between clips when using Play All Clips in Video Only or Video and Transcript Only Presentation Modes are smoother.
  
  
• Transana now has a Chinese - Simplfied translation, thanks to Zhong Hongquan and Bei Zhang.
  
  
• Single-user Transana's default database directory on Windows was moved from a location that was difficult to find to the "Transana 2" subdirectory of the "My Documents" folder. This change affects only first-time Transana installers to avoid problems for installed users.
  
  If you are upgrading from an earlier version of single-user Transana for Windows, you are strongly encouraged to move your data, as the new location is much more likely to get backed up and is easier to find during recovery from hard drive disasters.
  
  
• I updated the Manual and Tutorial extensively, as some content and all the graphics were quite out-of-date. I encourage everyone who hasn't done the Tutorial in a while to go through it again. You might just be surprised how much you will learn about Transana, even if you are comfortable with the program!
  
  
• When a transcript was sparsely time-coded, such that two adjacent time codes could not both be displayed on screen at once, several problems occurred. This was particularly problematic during transcription when the end timecode was not being displayed in the Transcript window. While this situation still presents some difficulty, I think the modified behavior will be considerably more user-friendly. (Thanks Harrie.)
  
  
• It used to be that you could not create a Quick Clip from within another Clip. Now you can.
  
  
• I discovered a problem with the "Update DB" function in the File Management tool. Specifically, if you updated a file name that was a subset of another existing file name, some file names were improperly updated. For example, if I had "Men's Focus Group.mov" and "Women's Focus Group.mov" episodes and I used "Update DB" on "Men's Focus Group.mov", the "Women's Focus Group.mov" episode and clips would end up pointing to the Men's video file. While I suspect this situation is very rare, the problems caused can be difficult to sort out.
  
  
• When you create a clip from an episode in Transana, Transana remembers what episode and transcript(s) that clips was created from. When you create a clip from another clips, previous versions of Transana would remember what clip the new clips was created from.
  
  However, parent clips are much more likely to get deleted than parent episode transcripts. If you decide to split a clip into smaller parts, there's a pretty good chance you'll decide to delete the original source clip. The result was that many clips were being unnecessarily orphaned, and the "Locate Clip in Episode" feature wouldn't work for them as a result.
  
  Starting with Transana 2.40, when clips are created from other clips, the parent data will reflect the source clip's episode transcript rather than the source clip itself. This is expected to reduce the number of orphaned clips.
  
  As part of this change, the first time you run Transana 2.40, the program will go through all your clips looking for clips parented by other clips, and will alter the data to show these clips as being parented by the originating episode. While this is not possible for clips that have already been orphaned, it should prevent further clip orphaning if you delete parent clips from your database.
  
  
• If you had multiple-transcript clips and used Play All Clips in All Windows presentation mode, only one transcript was displayed, and the Transcript window was improperly sized. This problem has been resolved so that multiple transcripts are now displayed correctly.
  
  
• It used to be that when you loaded a new media file, you lost your playback speed setting. (The setting slider didn't change, just the playback speed.) This has been fixed so that your selected playback speed is retained.
  
  
• Episode Keywords were disappearing during Database Import. This has been fixed.
  
  
• In multi-user Transana, if one user performed an activity that required a change to the sort order of clips in a collection while another user had one of the records in that collection locked, several problems could arise. Sometimes, clips would disappear from the database tree. Other times, clips would be displayed in the wrong order. No data was lost, once you restarted Transana, but the display contents were temporarily incorrect. This situation now produces a warning message indicating that sort order could not be set correctly and the display on all computers reflects the data accurately.
  
  
• Windows Vista users are no longer offered a Media Player option that Vista does not support.
  
  
• Windows Vista users occasionally (rarely) found clips starting at the beginning of the media file rather than the beginning of the clip. This has been fixed. (Thanks Sonya!)
  
  
• There was a subtle bug caused by editing labels within the Database Tree on the Mac. Specifically, if you edited a label, then clicked on another label before pressing "Enter" to finish the label edit, the edit could get applied to the wrong data object, the one you clicked onto. (Thanks Stephanie!)
  
  
• I changed the way Transana creates waveform diagrams. All waveforms are now created in memory, and graphic files used in waveform creation have been eliminated. The "Waveform Quick-Load" option has been removed from the Options menu.
  
  
• There was an encoding error when the Series Keyword Percentage Graph was populating its Filter Dialog. This has been fixed.
  
  
• Non-English users, particularly those in Japan, had difficulty installing Transana 2.30. This issue should be resolved.
  
  
• Blank lines in Transana-XML files caused import problems. This has been resolved.
  
  
• There was a problem exporting data when keyword definitions contained Unicode characters. This problem has been resolved.
  
  
• I fixed the unicode error in the error message about not being able to locate the database.