The latest articles on DEV Community by PawmelMeller (@pawmelmeller). https://dev.to/pawmelmeller https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4018402%2Fcddbf33c-7df8-4b6d-8845-10ba69b372d2.png https://dev.to/pawmelmeller en PawmelMeller Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:35:49 +0000 https://dev.to/pawmelmeller/turning-long-podcasts-meetings-and-videos-into-usable-notes-for-free-595k https://dev.to/pawmelmeller/turning-long-podcasts-meetings-and-videos-into-usable-notes-for-free-595k <p>A 90-minute podcast or a recorded meeting is a wall of audio. The useful part — the three decisions, the one quote, the action items — is buried in it. Re-listening at 1.5x is not a workflow. Here's the free flow I use instead.</p> <h2> 1. Get the transcript </h2> <p>Paste the link (or upload the file) and let it transcribe the whole thing — no 15-minute cap. Works for a <a href="https://longscribe.com/podcast-transcription" rel="noopener noreferrer">podcast episode</a>, a <a href="https://longscribe.com/meeting-transcription" rel="noopener noreferrer">recorded meeting</a>, or any <a href="https://longscribe.com/video-to-text" rel="noopener noreferrer">video turned into text</a>.</p> <h2> 2. Skim by timestamp, not by ear </h2> <p>Every segment keeps its timestamp, so you jump straight to "minute 34" instead of scrubbing. Reading is roughly 5x faster than listening.</p> <h2> 3. Pull the notes out </h2> <p>Copy the passages that matter into show notes, meeting minutes, or a study summary. Because it's text, you can Ctrl+F for a name or a number.</p> <h2> 4. Keep the source format if you need it </h2> <p>Export <code>.srt</code> if you're subtitling, <code>.docx</code> if you're handing it to someone, or just grab the plain text. Got an <a href="https://longscribe.com/mp3-to-text" rel="noopener noreferrer">MP3 you need as text</a>? Same flow.</p> <p>No signup, no cap, no paid tier — <a href="https://longscribe.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">longscribe.com</a>. The whole point was to make "I'll just read it later" actually possible.</p> productivity tutorial ai writing PawmelMeller Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:31:16 +0000 https://dev.to/pawmelmeller/lessons-from-building-a-free-transcription-tool-that-actually-handles-long-videos-3g41 https://dev.to/pawmelmeller/lessons-from-building-a-free-transcription-tool-that-actually-handles-long-videos-3g41 <p>Most free transcription tools quietly cap you at ~15 minutes, or hold your transcript hostage behind a signup. I wanted the opposite: paste a link to a two-hour podcast or a full lecture and just get the text — free, no account. That became <a href="https://longscribe.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Longscribe</a>. Here's what turned out to be harder than expected.</p> <h2> 1. Long audio breaks the naive approach </h2> <p>Feeding a 2-hour file straight into Whisper is a great way to time out. The fix was chunking on silence boundaries, transcribing chunks with bounded retries, and stitching timestamps back together so the final <a href="https://longscribe.com/generate-srt-subtitles" rel="noopener noreferrer">SRT subtitles</a> still line up.</p> <h2> 2. Captions-first beats brute force </h2> <p>For <a href="https://longscribe.com/youtube-transcription" rel="noopener noreferrer">YouTube transcription</a>, downloading and transcribing audio is the expensive path. If a video already has captions, use them — it's faster, cheaper, and far kinder to rate limits. Only fall back to audio + Whisper when there genuinely are none.</p> <h2> 3. "Free" means every request has to be cheap </h2> <p>No paid APIs anywhere. Jobs run on a background queue so you can close the tab and get an email when it's done, instead of holding a browser connection open for 40 minutes.</p> <h2> 4. Export formats are the actual product </h2> <p>People don't want a text blob — they want timestamped segments, <code>.srt</code> subtitles, and a <code>.docx</code> they can hand to someone. That last mile mattered more than the model.</p> <p>It's live and free at <a href="https://longscribe.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">longscribe.com</a> if you want to throw a long recording at it.</p> webdev python ai showdev