MP3 to Text Converter — Free, Accurate, AI-Powered

Yes, the free preview transcribes up to 30 minutes of audio with no credit card required. Paid plans start at $2/month for 200 minutes (Starter), $5/month for 1,000 minutes (Basic), $10/month for 2,500 minutes (Pro), and $20/month for 6,000 minutes (Studio). All paid tiers include all 5 export formats — TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT, and JSON.

On clean MP3s recorded at 128 kbps or higher, OpenAI's Whisper Large-v3 model — which powers VexaScribe — reaches around 97% word accuracy (2.7% Word Error Rate on the LibriSpeech test-clean benchmark per the official Whisper paper). Real-world accuracy varies: studio podcasts 95-97%, multi-speaker Zoom recordings 90-95%, phone-call recordings 85-92%, and audio with heavy background noise 80-90%.

Audio files transit over TLS 1.2+ encryption and are stored encrypted at rest in AWS eu-west-2. We do not train AI models on your audio. We do not sell user data. You can delete files at any time from your dashboard, and account deletion is self-serve.

Yes, automatic speaker diarization is included on every transcript. Multiple speakers are labeled Speaker 1, Speaker 2, Speaker 3, and so on. You can rename speakers in the built-in editor (e.g., "Host", "Guest", actual names) before exporting.

VexaScribe transcribes MP3 files in 99 languages with automatic language detection — English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, and many more. No need to select the language manually.

Yes, every transcript opens in a synced editor where you can correct words, merge or split segments, rename speakers, and adjust timestamps. Edits save automatically. When you're ready, export to TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT, or JSON.

Free preview accepts files up to 30 minutes. Paid plans support files up to 5 GB and 10 hours per file. A 1-hour MP3 at 128 kbps is roughly 58 MB, well within both limits.

Yes, you can run OpenAI's Whisper model locally on your own machine using `pip install openai-whisper`. CPU-only processing runs at roughly 0.5–2× real-time, so a 1-hour MP3 takes 30 minutes to 2 hours on a laptop. This is the most private option for sensitive files where you want full local control. VexaScribe's cloud is faster (25-30× real-time) and adds speaker diarization, a polished editor, and 5 export formats.

Not reliably. Whisper's Word Error Rate on music with sung vocals exceeds 25% — the model is trained for speech, not lyrics. For studio-quality spoken-word audio (podcasts, interviews, lectures), accuracy is excellent. For music transcription, use a dedicated lyrics-recognition service.

Roughly 110-140 seconds per hour of audio on the cloud — about 25-30× real-time. A 10-minute MP3 takes ~25 seconds. A 1-hour podcast typically completes in 2-3 minutes.

Free preview: 30 minutes per file. Paid plans: up to 5 GB per file (around 8-10 hours of audio at 128 kbps). The OpenAI Whisper API has a much smaller 25 MB hard cap by comparison — VexaScribe processes large files in a single pass without you needing to chunk them.

All MPEG-1 Layer III variants are supported — Constant Bitrate (CBR), Variable Bitrate (VBR), and Average Bitrate (ABR) — at bitrates from 32 kbps to 320 kbps, mono and stereo. Whisper internally resamples to 16 kHz mono per the official README, so there's no need to convert your file before uploading.

No. M4P FairPlay-protected files (Apple Music DRM) and any DRM-encrypted audio cannot be transcribed — VexaScribe cannot strip DRM. If you have legal rights to the audio, re-record from the original source or purchase a DRM-free version.

MP3 compression introduces roughly 10% relative WER increase versus uncompressed WAV in noisy conditions, per IBM Watson research. OGG Opus is more efficient — only ~2% degradation. For best accuracy on long-form material, record in WAV or FLAC and convert to MP3 for storage. For short clips, MP3 at 128 kbps or higher is indistinguishable from WAV in clean environments.