FLAC is what you choose when a recording has to survive: a tape or minidisc transfer, an interview master, a lecture kept for good. Upload one and the words come back as a genuine .docx, so the archive gains a finding aid without anyone re-recording a thing. The first one is $0.99, readable in its entirety at any length · then 1,000 minutes for $8, held until you use them.
How it works
Nothing is written back to your file. A copy is read, and that is all.
Drop the FLAC in above. Anything over 500 MB, which is most of an hour at high resolution, uses the upload page.
Every line is timed, so a mumbled name on an old tape can be replayed on the spot and corrected while signed in.
DOCX, with times against each passage or without. TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON and Markdown come from the same transcript.
About FLAC
Which makes it the sensible thing to send from an archive.
Archives digitising cassette, reel and minidisc keep FLAC because it is lossless and open. Field recorders and mastering engineers use it for the same reasons.
The same recording compresses to 50 or 60 per cent of its WAV size: near 300 to 400 MB an hour at CD rate. A 24-bit 96 kHz transfer is nearer 1 GB an hour.
At CD rate, 5 GB is around thirteen hours, past the ten-hour per-file limit. For archive material, plan around length rather than size.
Hiss, wow and dropouts from the source medium are in the file and they cost accuracy. A transcript from a degraded tape deserves a read-through first.
| FLAC source | One hour | Three hours | Ten hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16-bit 44.1 kHz mono transfer | ~180 MB | ~540 MB | ~1.8 GB |
| 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo | ~350 MB | ~1 GB | ~3.5 GB |
| 24-bit 96 kHz stereo | ~1 GB | ~3 GB | Over the 5 GB limit |
Compression varies with the material, so quiet spoken word usually comes out smaller than this.
Who works this way
An archive nobody can search is an archive nobody uses.
Hours of testimony become documents a researcher can read and cite, while the master stays put.
A digitisation project that produces sound can produce text in the same pass.
Spoken introductions, questions and asides become searchable alongside the recording.
Recordings kept for decades gain a written index, so finding a passage need not mean playing the reel.
Pricing
Every minute costs the same whether it arrived as a lossless master or a small copy. The first transcript is free and complete at any length.
Fifty hours of oral history is 3,000 minutes, which fits the $24 pack of 5,000 with room to spare: under a cent a minute, and the leftover credit never expires. Pricing has the breakdown.
FAQ
Only for speed. FLAC uploads directly, but on a slow connection a compressed copy sends faster for the same transcript.
A little, on faint tape, though far less than people expect. Source quality matters more than the file format around it.
No. Speaker labels belong to the transcript view on this page. The DOCX download is the text of what was said, and JSON is the export carrying speaker information.
Ten hours, within 5 GB. At CD rate the length limit arrives long before the size limit, so a single sitting is rarely a problem.
Not usually, but they cost accuracy. Names and overlapping voices on a degraded transfer are worth checking by ear.
Yes, a real Word document and not rich text renamed, so it edits, restyles and takes comments in any word processor.
Yes. Export DOCX with the time against each passage when the transcript needs to point back into the recording.
Transcripts sit in your own library, searchable, and any format can be downloaded again. Your audio and transcripts are never used to train AI models.
Instant preview, no signup. Ten hours per file, charged by the minute.