Transcribe recordings from an archive decades-old tape, searchable today.
A digitised reel or cassette transfer from an archive is transcribed at about 2 minutes per hour of audio, so a 90-minute cassette takes about 3 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, and a collection of 60 hours fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes.
What old tape does to a transcript
Hiss, hum and a speaker who sat too far away. The content is still in there.
Tape noise is not speech
Hiss, mains hum and the flutter of a stretched tape sit under the voice rather than on top of it, and the transcription follows the voice. Music beds and crowd noise are not transcribed. Where the original microphone was far from the speaker or the tape has dropouts, expect gaps, and mark them for the listener who checks the file.
Transfers that run for hours
A digitised reel or a side-by-side cassette transfer can be one long file. Each file can run up to 10 hours or 5 GB, so most transfers go up as the digitiser saved them, without cutting them at the tape boundaries.
A collection, priced
Forty cassettes of 90 minutes each come to 3,600 minutes. That fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes, about $0.29 per audio hour, and the pack includes API access for a batch run from your own catalogue. Begin on upload page or drop one transfer here first.
Finding aids from the brief
Every transfer comes back with a brief, chapters with timestamps, and the names, places and dates said on the tape. Speakers are named in the summary, key quotes and chapters, which is most of what a catalogue entry or finding aid needs before a cataloguer refines it.
Why archive audio stays unheard
A tape that nobody can search is a tape nobody plays.
✗ Digitised, then shelved again
Collections get transferred to files and then wait, because listening to every hour is the bottleneck.
- Hundreds of hours with a one-line label each
- Tools that refuse files over 25 MB
- Splitting each transfer into small parts
- Paying per hour at rates sized for court work
- Dates and names buried in the middle of side B
- No timestamps to cite a passage
✓ Every transfer becomes text
Upload the transfers as they are and read the collection instead of only cataloguing its boxes.
- About 3 minutes per 90-minute cassette
- The first 20 minutes free on one tape
- Sixty hours inside a $24 pack
- Names, places and dates pulled into the brief
- Chapters for each topic on the tape
- API access on the 5,000-minute pack
Sample
A cassette transfer, as the transcript reads.
Illustrative sample: written for this page, not transcribed from a customer tape. Bracketed notes show how gaps in old tape tend to look.
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
Archive transfers, the practical questions.
How long does a digitised tape take?
Roughly 2 minutes for every hour of tape. A 90-minute cassette takes around 3 minutes, a 6-hour reel transfer about 12. Our public proof shows a 9.31-hour file finished in 1,033 seconds, at /proof/long-files.
What does a collection cost to transcribe?
Count the minutes. Up to 500 minutes fits the $6 pack, up to 2,000 the $12 pack, and up to 5,000 the $24 pack. Forty 90-minute cassettes, 3,600 minutes in all, go on the $24 pack. Credits never expire, so a collection can be worked through over months. A first-time visitor has the first 20 minutes free to test one tape.
Our transfers are high-resolution WAV. Will they upload?
An hour of CD-quality WAV is roughly 600 MB, and preservation masters at higher resolution are larger. Before the first pack, files up to 2 GB upload; after it, up to 5 GB and 10 hours per file. Keep the master untouched and send an MP3 or FLAC access copy, which carries the same speech in far less space.
Does tape quality change what comes back?
It changes how much comes back. Clear speech on a worn tape is usually fine. Very low levels, heavy dropouts and a speaker recorded from across a hall are where words are lost. Plan a listening pass on the passages you intend to quote.
Older recordings are in other languages. Do they work?
99 languages are detected automatically, so a box of mixed-language tapes needs no sorting first. A tape that switches language is detected on its main language. Regional Philippine languages such as Cebuano or Ilocano are supported as a fast first draft; plan one review pass.
Which exports come back, and who sees the audio?
Every run gives TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. JSON carries the timestamps for import into a catalogue or a viewer. On privacy, recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, which matters for donor collections with restricted access.
Related
Related long-recording work
Send the first tape. The first 20 minutes of the tape are free.
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