Transcribe a long Castro episode even though the app keeps the audio.
Castro plays episodes but does not hand you the audio file, so a long episode is transcribed from the show's source RSS feed or from an MP3 downloaded from the show's website. A 4-hour episode is text in about 8 minutes, the first 20 minutes are free, and the $6 pack of 500 minutes covers it with 260 left.
Getting around the missing export
The app keeps its downloads to itself. The show's feed does not.
What Castro can and cannot give you
Castro is a player: it subscribes to feeds and queues episodes, but it offers no export for the audio it has saved. The feed it subscribes to is public for most shows, and that address is the one to paste here.
Marathon episodes in one piece
Four-hour conversations, history series and full debates run far past what many tools accept in one go. A single file can be up to 10 hours or 5 GB, so a four-hour episode needs no splitting, and two of them fit one $6 pack with 20 minutes to spare.
Chapters for a four-hour listen
Long episodes are hard to move around in any player. The timestamped chapters show where each topic begins, so you can skip to minute 152 in your player and hear the part that matters.
Read faster than you can listen
At around 150 spoken words a minute, four hours is about 36,000 words. The brief states the argument and takeaways in a few lines, and a chat over the transcript answers a specific question without reading the lot.
Why four-hour episodes go unfinished
Most listeners never reach hour three. The text gets you there.
✗ Stuck in the queue
The episode is downloaded on your phone, and none of it can be searched.
- No audio export from the player app
- Episodes abandoned halfway through
- One argument lost somewhere in hour three
- Re-listening to check a single figure
- Show notes too thin to navigate
- Tools that stop well short of four hours
✓ Four hours you can read
Paste the feed, and the whole marathon comes back as text with chapters.
- Four hours turned into text in about 8 minutes
- First 20 minutes free from the feed
- Chapters to jump straight to hour three
- Every book and name mentioned, in one list
- Two 4-hour episodes on one $6 pack
- Exports for notes, captions and search
Sample
A four-hour history episode, in its third hour.
This sample is illustrative and invented for this page; no real podcast is quoted. The timestamps show how far into a four-hour episode each line falls.
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
Castro episodes, the common questions.
How long does a 4-hour episode take?
Expect about 8 minutes, since processing runs near 2 minutes per audio hour. For a published comparison, a 4.94-hour file finished in 372 seconds.
What does a long-episode show cost to follow?
One 4-hour episode is 240 minutes on the $6 pack of 500, leaving 260. A weekly 4-hour show for a quarter, 13 episodes, is 3,120 minutes and sits on the $24 pack of 5,000 with 1,880 to spare.
Castro shows the episode but no download. What do I paste?
Paste the show's RSS feed, which you can usually find on the show's website or its podcast host's page. If the show offers a direct MP3 download, that file uploads too. If full episodes are on YouTube, the YouTube link also works.
How big is the file, and will a 4-hour episode need cutting?
A 4-hour MP3 at 128 kbps is about 230 MB (128,000 × 14,400 seconds ÷ 8), well under the 2 GB that uploads before a pack. One file takes up to 10 hours or 5 GB, so the episode goes in whole.
Which languages are supported?
99 are detected automatically, including Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew and Afrikaans. An episode that switches language is detected on its main one, and the switches are handled. Intro music is not transcribed; the conversation is.
What can I export from a Castro episode, and is it private?
The marathon exports as TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. Episodes pulled from a feed for this are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training.
Related
More for marathon episodes
Paste the feed Castro follows. Your first 20 minutes of it are free.
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