MP3 to Text Converter Read the Transcript in Minutes

What you get from an MP3 file

MP3 is still the format most recordings end up in. Podcast episodes, voice recorder apps, exported phone calls, lecture capture systems and old interview archives all produce it, which is why "mp3 to text" is usually the first thing people search for when they need a transcript. Transcrify takes the file as it is. There is no need to convert it to WAV first or to trim it in an editor.

The result is a transcript split into paragraphs, with a timestamp at the start of each segment and a label for every speaker the model could tell apart. The language is detected automatically from the first seconds of audio, and more than fifty languages are supported, so a bilingual interview or a podcast recorded in Spanish needs no special settings.

Compression matters less than people expect. Speech survives MP3 encoding well, and a mono file at 64 kbps transcribes about as accurately as a studio master. What does hurt accuracy is the recording itself: a phone lying on a table three metres from the speaker, heavy background music or two people talking over each other. If you can choose, record close to the mouth and keep the music for the final mix.

How long it takes

A typical recording is transcribed in a few minutes. An hour-long episode usually takes between three and five minutes, depending on how many files are in the queue at that moment. The page shows the progress, and you can keep working in another tab; the result stays available under the same link when you come back.

Longer files are fine. The free limit is 3 hours per recording, which covers a full conference session or a three-part interview in a single upload. The audio is processed in parallel segments, so a two-hour file does not take twice as long as a one-hour file.

Your recording stays on our servers

Transcrify runs its own speech models on its own hardware. The audio you upload is not forwarded to a third-party speech API, which is the part most people worry about when the file is a client call, a therapy session or an unreleased episode. The same applies to the free transcriptions you make here without an account.

If you later create an account, the transcripts you made as a guest are moved into it, so nothing has to be uploaded twice.

When the free transcript is not enough

The guest transcript is read-only: you can read it and copy the text. A free account adds an editor for fixing names and terms, a transcription history, and downloads in SRT, VTT and TXT, together with 5 hours of transcription across 10 files. AI chat with the recording, automatic summaries and export to PDF or Word are part of the paid plans.