Transcribe audio files into text with MacBook Air m2 15 inch

FWIW, MacWhisper handles MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4 and MOV files. There's also a beta Transcribe Podcast function which I haven't tested.

Also, the Pro versions can handle 100 languages. There may be a length limit with the free version.

There is a Shortcuts action "Audio to Text" that is pretty fussy about the kind of audio file it receives and what it transcribes. You can forget about extracting lyrics from music as it does not like the Eagles, Foreigner, or Adele which was my test. It will transcribe audio from spoken content created in Apple's Voice Memos application.

One option is MacWhisper. See this 9to5 article.

Shortcuts could extract spoken text from a really short AIFF audio, and a equally short M4a from Voice Memos, but borked on all music M4a audio.

I don't believe I would entrust Apple's Shortcuts action to handle 2 hours of spoken audio, and the MacWhisper app may be better suited for this purpose. It would also depend in what audio format the OP's spoken content may be in.

Consider using the free open source OpenAI Whisper model locally. Installing it via Pinokio is not as user friendly, but at least I did not have to code anything and I did not have to pay 40 Euros for MacWhisper.

Pinokio Whisper did an excellent job transcribing an hour talk on my M1 MacBook Pro.

[Edited by Moderator]

Welcome. MacWhisper is the only one I've had any experience with.

VikingOSX wrote:

You can forget about extracting lyrics from music…

Just to add, MacWhisper had no trouble extracting the lyrics from an mp3 of Take Me Away by PP Arnold.

VikingOSX wrote:

You can forget about extracting lyrics from music as it does not like the Eagles, Foreigner, or Adele which was my test.

Maybe that says something about the Eagles, Foreigner, and Adele. 😎