Transcribe a long M4A straight from your phone.
Long M4A files usually come from Voice Memos or a phone recorder that was left running through a lecture, an interview or a whole meeting. Voice M4A is small, about 30 to 60 MB per hour, so even ten hours goes up as one file, and the words are usually back at about 2 minutes per hour of audio. The first 20 minutes are free on your first recording.
Why M4A is the easy case
Small on disk, long in time.
A whole day in under a gigabyte
Voice recordings in M4A, the AAC format phones use, run about 30 to 60 MB per hour. A four-hour memo is about 120 to 240 MB and a ten-hour one about 300 to 600 MB. The 10-hour length limit is the only one an M4A will meet, because its size never gets close to 5 GB.
Upload from the phone itself
Save the memo to Files or your downloads folder, then open whipscribe.com in the phone's browser and choose it in the upload box. On a desktop, drag it in from wherever it synced to. A very long memo can also go in from the upload page.
Under 2 GB, so the preview runs first
Because a long M4A stays well under 2 GB, it starts before you buy anything. A recording up to 20 minutes transcribes in full, a longer one shows a preview, and a pack from $6 transcribes the rest from where the preview ended.
Find the part you needed
A phone left recording for hours picks up everything, including long stretches you do not need. Chapters with timestamps, the questions the recording answers and a chat over the transcript take you to the useful part without scrubbing through the memo.
Before / after
A long voice memo should not need a laptop to rescue it.
✗ Stuck on the phone
Long phone recordings tend to sit unplayed, because getting text out of them has meant a chain of transfers and conversions.
- Emailing the file to yourself and hitting the attachment limit
- A converter app to turn M4A into MP3
- A memo cut into hour-long pieces
- Scrubbing a waveform for one sentence
- Typed notes that miss half of what was said
- A recording left unheard because it is four hours long
✓ From memo to text in one step
The M4A uploads as recorded and comes back searchable.
- Uploads straight from a phone browser
- Ten hours of voice under 600 MB
- About eight minutes to transcribe four hours
- One timeline, chapters with timestamps
- Speakers identified in the brief and chapters
- A four-hour memo is 240 minutes of a $6 pack
Sample output
Four hours of memo, the moments that matter.
This sample is illustrative, not a real voice memo. It shows how a phone recording left running through a long session comes back with its real clock times.
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 M4A questions.
How long will my long M4A take to transcribe?
Roughly 2 minutes for each hour of audio once it is uploaded. A two-hour memo is usually ready in about four minutes, and because voice M4A files are small, the upload rarely adds much.
How much does a long M4A cost to transcribe?
It is priced by length, and your first 20 minutes are free. A five-hour memo is 300 minutes, which the $6 pack (500 minutes) covers with at least 200 minutes left. The $12 pack (2,000 minutes) suits someone who records every day.
Is there a size limit for M4A?
The ceiling is 5 GB and 10 hours per file, and an M4A voice recording reaches the hours long before the gigabytes. Ten hours of voice is about 300 to 600 MB.
My phone recorded for 11 hours. Can I send it?
Not as one file, since 10 hours is the most one file can hold. Trim it into two parts in the Voice Memos editor or any audio app, at a quiet moment, and upload both.
What languages can it handle?
99 languages, picked up automatically from the recording. There is nothing to set before you upload the memo.
Which formats can I download, and is the memo kept private?
The memo downloads as TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT or JSON. Memos are transcribed on our own servers and are not used for training any model.
Related
Related pages.
Your phone already made the file. Send the M4A as it is.
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