Transcribe a 4-hour oral history without cutting the story into pieces.
A 4-hour oral history session is 240 minutes of audio, and at about 2 minutes per audio hour it comes back as text in roughly 8 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, and a $6 pack of 500 minutes transcribes the rest of the session with at least 260 minutes left for the next narrator.
What a life-story recording needs
Four hours of memory, laid out so a researcher can find the year, the street and the name.
A four-hour tape in eight minutes
Oral history runs long because the narrator sets the pace: pauses, tea, a story picked up again an hour later. None of that slows the processing, which runs at about 2 minutes per audio hour, so the full session is usually ready in around 8 minutes and you can leave the tab while it works.
The sum for 240 minutes
The first 20 minutes come back free so you can judge how the narrator's accent and the place names were handled. The rest is drawn from a $6 pack of 500 minutes, which leaves at least 260 minutes for a second narrator of similar length. Credits never expire, so a project that records once a month keeps its balance between visits.
Archive WAV and phone audio both fit
Archives often record uncompressed WAV. At 16-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo, four hours is a little over 2.5 GB, which starts once a pack is on the account and stays well inside the 5 GB ceiling. The same four hours as a 128 kbps MP3 is about 230 MB and uploads before any purchase.
Names, places and years pulled out
The brief lists the names, numbers and dates the narrator said, and timestamped chapters mark where the story moves from childhood to work to later life. Speakers are named in the summary, key quotes and chapters, so the interviewer's prompts stand apart from the answers when you draft the abstract.
Why long sessions stall
Most oral history projects hold more tape than transcripts.
✗ The usual backlog
Volunteers type far slower than people talk, and many automatic services refuse a single file anywhere near four hours.
- Days of volunteer typing for one session
- Sessions cut into parts to pass an upload cap
- A new clock at the start of each part
- Place names misheard with nothing to check against
- Recordings waiting months for a volunteer
- Index terms written from memory
✓ One session, one upload
The interview goes up exactly as it was recorded and the four hours come back on one clock.
- Eight minutes or so for 240 minutes of tape
- Twenty free minutes to test the narrator's voice
- At least 260 minutes left on the $6 pack
- Dates and places listed in the brief
- Chapters to start the finding aid
- DOCX for the archive, JSON for a catalogue
Sample
A stretch of a long life-story interview.
This sample is illustrative and was written for this page; it is not taken from a real narrator or archive. Timestamps count from the start of the four-hour 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 oral history sessions, answered.
How long does a 4-hour oral history take to transcribe?
About 8 minutes. Processing runs at roughly 2 minutes per hour of audio, and the public proof page shows a 4.94-hour file finished in 372 seconds. If you close the page, the transcript is waiting in your Library when you come back.
What does a 4-hour session cost, and on which pack?
Four hours is 240 minutes, and a first-time visitor gets the first 20 of them free. The $6 pack of 500 minutes covers the rest and leaves at least 260 minutes. A project with eight sessions of this length, 1,920 minutes in all, fits the $12 pack of 2,000 minutes at $0.36 an audio hour.
Will a 4-hour WAV file upload?
Yes. Before the first pack, files up to 2 GB upload, and a CD-quality stereo WAV of four hours is just over that, so it starts once a pack is on the account. After that, one file can be up to 5 GB. If your recorder wrote 24-bit 48 kHz stereo, four hours is about 4.1 GB and still fits.
Do I have to split the interview into parts?
No. One file can run up to 10 hours or 5 GB, whichever comes first, so a four-hour session goes up whole and keeps one set of timestamps. Only a recording past 10 hours needs to become two files.
What about accents, dialect and a second language?
99 languages are detected automatically, and a recording that switches language is transcribed on its main language. Narrators who drop into a home language for a saying or a prayer are common in oral history, so plan to listen to those passages again. Songs and background music are not transcribed; the speech is.
Which formats come out, and who keeps the recording?
TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON all come from the same run, so the archive copy and the captioned clip share one clock. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, and you can delete the file and its transcript whenever your consent terms require it.
Related
Other long recordings for an archive
Send the whole session. Twenty minutes in, you decide.
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