Transcribe long recordings edited in ocenaudio and make a big WAV small first.
Open a long WAV in ocenaudio, export it as MP3 and upload the result; a 5-hour recording then comes back as text in about 10 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, and the $6 pack of 500 minutes covers 5 hours with 200 minutes left.
A long WAV, made easy to send
Trim the silence, shrink the file, then upload.
Export as MP3
ocenaudio is a free editor that handles long WAV files well. Trim the dead air at the start and end, then use the export or save-as option in the File menu and choose MP3. Check the export settings for the bitrate; 128 kbps is plenty for speech.
Why shrink first
A 16-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo WAV is about 635 MB per hour, so 5 hours is roughly 3.2 GB. That is over the 2 GB that uploads before a pack. As a 128 kbps MP3, the same 5 hours is about 288 MB and uploads in a fraction of the time.
Minutes for a long recording
Five hours is 300 minutes on the $6 pack of 500, leaving 200. A week of daily 5-hour recordings is 1,500 minutes, which fits the $12 pack of 2,000 with 500 to spare.
What the text gives you
You get a brief with the thesis and takeaways, chapters with timestamps across all five hours, and the names, numbers and dates that came up. The chat answers a question about the recording without replaying it.
Long WAV files elsewhere
A multi-gigabyte WAV is the first thing an upload form refuses.
✗ Where long WAVs get stuck
Size limits stop the file before length does.
- Uploads refused at 25 MB on the Whisper API
- Hours of silence billed as audio
- Cutting the WAV into a dozen parts
- Each part transcribed on its own clock
- Slow uploads over home connections
- Recordings left untranscribed
✓ After an MP3 export
The same speech, a tenth of the size.
- Silence trimmed in ocenaudio
- About 288 MB for 5 hours
- Five hours read in about 10 minutes
- One continuous timeline
- A chapter for each change of topic
- $6 covers 300 minutes
Sample
A 5-hour recorded workshop, exported as MP3.
This sample is illustrative, written for this page and not drawn from a real workshop. Timestamps show a 5-hour recording.
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
ocenaudio recordings, answered.
How long does a 5-hour recording take?
About 10 minutes, at roughly 2 minutes per audio hour, once the MP3 has finished uploading. The proof page shows 4.94 hours finished in 372 seconds.
What will a 5-hour recording cost?
A first-time visitor transcribes the opening 20 minutes free. Five hours is 300 minutes on the $6 pack, which leaves 200 minutes for the next long file. A week of such recordings, 1,500 minutes, fits the $12 pack.
Do I have to convert the WAV?
No, a WAV up to 5 GB uploads as it is, and files over 2 GB start once a pack is on the account. Exporting as MP3 just makes the upload smaller and faster.
My recording is 11 hours long. What then?
Split it into two files in ocenaudio at a pause, each under 10 hours, and upload both. Recordings up to 10 hours go up whole, so a single long day of audio rarely needs cutting at all. ocenaudio shows the length in the status bar, which is the quickest way to check before you export.
Does the recording have to be in English?
No. 99 languages are detected automatically with nothing to set, and Tagalog, Portuguese and Swedish are among them. A recording that switches language is transcribed on its main one.
Exports and privacy?
Five downloads come back: TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, and deleting a file removes its text too.
Related
Long audio and editing tools
Export the MP3 and send it. Try the opening 20 minutes free.
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