The problem
A broadcast archive is a treasure that nobody can search. Decades of recordings — interviews, news, programmes — sit as tape or files, valuable but inaccessible, because finding anything means knowing exactly which recording it's on and listening through it.
How Whipscribe helps
Whipscribe transcribes archive recordings into timestamped, speaker-labelled, fully searchable text, so a researcher, journalist, or producer can find the moment, the guest, or the topic across the whole archive in seconds — unlocking material that's been effectively lost to time.
Search the whole archive
Full-text search across years of recordings for a person, a topic, or a phrase.
Unlock old material
Turn inaccessible tape into a resource for research, documentaries, anniversaries, and repurposing.
Speaker-labelled & timecoded
Every result ties to a speaker and a moment, so citation and clipping are precise.
Private & at your pace
Self-hosted Whisper, pay-as-you-go — digitise the archive as fast or slow as budget allows.
Questions
Can it handle a large back-catalogue?
Yes — pay-as-you-go with no per-seat fee and files up to 10 hours each, so you can work through an archive of any size at your own pace.
What about old or lower-quality recordings?
Whisper is robust to a range of audio quality; try it on a sample of your archive first to see how it handles your material.
Where is the audio processed?
On private infrastructure with open-source Whisper — never sent to a third-party AI service, and never used to train models.
Note: Whipscribe is a transcription tool that makes recordings searchable; it complements your recording and retention systems, it does not replace them, and nothing here is legal advice. Confirm your current obligations with your licence conditions and the applicable code.