Transcribe a long APE file from a lossless archive.
A Monkey's Audio (APE) file is a lossless archive, often around half the size of the WAV it came from, so an hour at CD quality is commonly near 300 MB and 10 hours stays under 5 GB. If the upload refuses the APE, convert it to FLAC or MP3 first; then it transcribes at about 2 minutes per hour, with the first 20 minutes free.
APE, worked out
A compact lossless format that fewer tools read every year.
What Monkey's Audio keeps
APE compresses audio without discarding anything, so it decodes back to the exact original. It was popular for music and archive collections, and many speech archives were saved in it too. How small it gets depends on the material and the compression level chosen.
Size per hour, with the working
The source WAV at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo is 1,411,200 bits a second, about 635 MB an hour. APE often lands near half that, roughly 300 MB; speech and mono recordings frequently compress further. Ten hours at 300 MB is about 3 GB, inside the 5 GB line.
Convert only when refused
If the upload refuses the file, convert it to MP3 first, or to FLAC to stay lossless. ffmpeg reads APE: ffmpeg -i tape.ape -c:a flac tape.flac, or -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 128k tape.mp3. Then drop it on the upload page.
What the archive turns into
Hours of talk come back as a brief with the main points, chapters with timestamps, the names, numbers and dates said, and the questions the recording answers. A chat over the transcript lets you ask what was said about any subject.
Why APE archives sit unread
Lossless and long is the hardest combination for most upload boxes.
✗ An archive that is hard to open
One hour of APE at about 300 MB is roughly twelve times the OpenAI Whisper API's documented 25 MB upload limit.
- Formats many services do not list
- Caps in megabytes, not gigabytes
- Tapes chopped into short parts
- A new timeline for every part
- Listening back to find one passage
- No index across the collection
✓ Convert once, transcribe whole
One conversion if needed, one upload, one transcript per tape.
- FLAC keeps it lossless, MP3 keeps it small
- Each converted file up to 10 h or 5 GB
- Processing at about 2 minutes an hour
- Chapters across each full tape
- $12 for 2,000 minutes of archive
- Text, Word, subtitle and JSON files
Sample
A recorded lecture series from an old archive, hour four.
Illustrative sample, written for this page and not taken from any real archive. Timestamps mark where each line sits in a long APE transfer.
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
Long APE files, answered.
How long does a long APE recording take?
About 2 minutes of processing per hour of audio after upload, so a 6-hour APE (or the FLAC made from it) is ready in about 12 minutes. A 300 MB-an-hour file uploads in a few minutes on most broadband.
What does a 6-hour APE cost to transcribe?
Six hours is 360 minutes, inside the $6 pack (500 minutes), with 140 left over. A collection of 30 hours, 1,800 minutes, fits the $12 pack (2,000 minutes). First-time visitors get the first 20 minutes of the archive free.
Is APE accepted directly?
Try it first. If the upload refuses the file, convert it to MP3 first, or to FLAC if you want the copy to stay lossless; ffmpeg, foobar2000 and the Monkey's Audio program itself can all decode APE.
What if one APE runs past 10 hours?
Split it into two files at a natural break, such as the end of a session or tape side. Each half comes back with timestamps from zero, so keep a note of which part is first.
Which languages can the archive be in?
Any of 99, detected automatically, including Hebrew, Afrikaans and Tagalog. Music on the recording is not transcribed, only the speech.
What comes back, and who can see the archive?
A transcript in TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON, with speakers named in the summary, key quotes and chapters. Archive audio is transcribed on our own servers and is never used for training.
Related
Related formats
Upload the archive. The first 20 minutes of the first tape are free.
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