Transcribe WAV audio to text
Transcribe WAV files to text free, even large uncompressed recordings. Nothing is uploaded: transcription runs locally in your browser.
Drop your video or audio file here
or click to browse. It’s free, no signup.
MP4 · MOV · WebM · MKV · AVI · MP3 · WAV · M4A and more
🔒 100% private: transcription runs in your browser. Your file is never uploaded.
WAV files are uncompressed, which makes them huge: an hour of CD-quality stereo is over 600 MB. Uploading that to a transcription site takes ages. FreeTranscribe skips the upload. The file is read straight from your disk and transcribed in your browser.
Ideal for field recorders, podcast masters, DAW bounces, and dictation machines.
Good to know
- Stereo and multichannel WAVs are mixed down to mono automatically, since speech recognition only needs one channel.
- High sample rates (48 or 96 kHz) and 24- or 32-bit files are fine; audio is resampled to the 16 kHz the model expects.
- The limit is 2 GB per file. For longer sessions, split the recording or convert it to MP3 first with our audio converter.
How it works
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Drop your file
Nothing is uploaded. The file stays on your device the whole time.
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AI transcribes locally
OpenAI’s Whisper model runs in your browser, so no server ever sees your file.
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Copy or download
Plain text, or timestamped SRT and VTT subtitles ready to use anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my WAV file so big?
WAV stores raw, uncompressed audio. That’s great for editing but unnecessary for transcription, which is why skipping the upload matters so much here.
Will a compressed copy transcribe worse?
Not noticeably. A decent MP3 or M4A of the same recording gives essentially the same transcript.
Do Broadcast WAV (BWF) files from field recorders work?
Yes. BWF files are regular WAV files with extra metadata, and they are handled the same way.