Transcribe a 4-hour council meeting before the clerk drafts the minutes.
A four-hour council meeting is 240 minutes of audio, and it comes back as text in about 8 minutes, with the first 20 minutes free. A $6 pack of 500 minutes covers the whole session and leaves at least 260 minutes for the next one. If the meeting is already posted on YouTube or Vimeo, paste that link instead of downloading the video.
What four hours of council business becomes
From the call to order to the adjournment, in one searchable document.
Paste the meeting's posted video
Councils that record usually publish the session as a video. Paste the YouTube or Vimeo link and the audio is fetched on our side, so a four-hour video never crosses your connection. If you hold the file instead, the box here takes up to 500 MB and a larger video continues on the upload page.
Agenda items as chapters
Council business moves item by item: roll call, public comment, the consent agenda, staff reports, new business. The chapters tend to land on those turns, each with its timestamp, so a resident can open the zoning item without scrubbing through three hours of video.
Motions, numbers and dates pulled out
The brief lists what was said aloud that a clerk has to copy exactly: the budget figure, the vote count, the date of the next hearing. Every item carries a timestamp, so it can be checked against the audio before it goes into the draft minutes.
240 minutes on the smallest pack
Four hours is 240 minutes, and the $6 pack holds 500. One meeting uses less than half of it, and a second four-hour session still fits with 20 minutes to spare. That is $0.72 per audio hour, bought once, with nothing to renew.
Why a full session is awkward elsewhere
A council meeting usually outlasts a free tier before the first vote.
✗ The usual workarounds
Most quick tools stop well short of four hours, and the captions on a posted meeting video are hard to quote from.
- Free tiers that quit after one hour
- Auto-captions with no paragraphs to copy
- Cutting the video into four parts first
- Four files that each restart at zero
- Scrubbing the video to find one motion
- Writing the minutes from handwritten notes
✓ One session, one transcript
The meeting goes in whole and comes back as a single document that keeps the meeting's own clock.
- About 8 minutes for the 240 minutes
- Twenty free minutes to check the roll call
- Chapters at each agenda turn
- Councillors named in the summary, quotes and chapters
- Votes, figures and dates with timestamps
- A minutes draft in DOCX, captions in SRT
Sample
Four hours of council business, read as text.
This sample is illustrative, written for this page and not taken from any real meeting, with times measured from the first second of the file.
Export
One transcript. Five clean formats.
Every pack exports all five — no format is held back for a higher tier.
Plain text
De-ummed paragraphs. Ready to paste.
SRT captions
Timed to the speech. Every video editor reads this.
WebVTT
HTML5 player + YouTube uploads.
Show notes
Formatted with chapters and pull-quotes.
Machine-readable
Timestamped text for your own tools.
Pricing
Honest pricing, no surprises.
A pack from $6 (500 minutes) opens the full transcript. After that, no subscription and no auto-renew — every tier is a one-time minute pack, and credits never expire. Buy once, use the minutes whenever you need them.
Casual pack
$6/500 min
8 hours of audio — $0.72 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 500 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$12/2,000 min
33 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 2,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
Bulk pack
$24/5,000 min
83 hours of audio — $0.29 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 5,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Four-hour council meetings, the common questions.
How long does a 4-hour council meeting take to transcribe?
About 8 minutes. Processing runs at roughly 2 minutes per hour of audio, so 240 minutes is a short wait, and you can close the tab while it runs. Your Library holds the transcript when you return.
What does a 4-hour council meeting cost?
It uses 240 minutes of the $6 pack, which holds 500, so at least 260 minutes stay on the account. A year of monthly four-hour meetings is 2,880 minutes, which fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes with room left for special sessions. Credits never expire.
The meeting video is 3 GB. Will it upload?
Before the first pack, uploads go up to 2 GB, and a file between 2 and 5 GB starts once a pack is on the account. An audio-only copy of four hours at a common MP3 setting is closer to 230 MB. The simplest route is the posted link, which needs no upload at all.
Should I split the recording at the recess?
No. One file can run up to 10 hours or 5 GB, so a four-hour meeting with a recess in the middle stays whole and keeps one timeline. Splitting only makes sense if the night ran past 10 hours.
Is this transcript the official record of the meeting?
No. It is a working transcript a clerk can draft minutes from and residents can search. The minutes the council approves remain the record, and the timestamps make it quick to check any line against the recording.
Which languages, formats and privacy apply?
99 languages are detected automatically. A meeting is detected on its main language, so if a few speakers at public comment use another language, read those passages closely. The clerk can export TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT or JSON. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, which matters for a session with a closed portion.
Related
Other long public meetings
Send the whole session. The opening 20 minutes are free.
Transcribe a council meetingOperated by Neugence Technology Pvt. Ltd. · contact@whipscribe.com · Security · Privacy · Terms