Podcasts → Text · Local · Free
Transcribe a podcast episode to text — on your Mac
Paste an Apple Podcasts episode URL — or just search by name — and get a full Apple Podcasts transcript on your Mac. Local, private, and no per-minute fees, so a whole back catalog costs nothing but a little compute time.
https://podcasts.apple.com/…?i=… macOS 14.2+ · Apple Silicon · Free & open-source · no account
Why transcribe a podcast?
A podcast is hours of dense, quotable conversation locked inside audio. A transcript unlocks it: you can skim an hour in ten minutes, quote a guest word-for-word, and search a back catalog you could never re-listen to.
- Researchers & students — turn an interview into a citable source with exact quotes and timestamps.
- Journalists — pull the precise wording of a statement instead of paraphrasing from memory.
- Podcasters — generate show notes, chapter markers, and social clips from the text in minutes.
MacParakeet resolves an Apple Podcasts episode URL to its audio through the public iTunes lookup — or you can skip the link hunt entirely and search by name from the CLI. Either way it runs on your Mac, with no per-minute fees, so transcribing a 200-episode archive is free. Unlike Apple Podcasts built-in transcripts, the output is a file you can export, search, quote, and keep with your own notes. For a step-by-step walkthrough with batch commands, see how to transcribe a podcast on your Mac.
How to transcribe podcast episodes on your Mac
Free, local, and no upload to a transcription cloud. The whole thing takes about a minute the first time, seconds after that.
- 1
Get the episode link — or just its name
Copy an Apple Podcasts episode link (
podcasts.apple.com/…?i=…), a direct MP3 from the show's site, or note the show and episode title. Any public RSS feed works. - 2
Paste it — or search from the CLI
Paste the link into the Transcribe tab, or from the terminal run
macparakeet-cli transcribe --podcast "show + episode"to find it through the iTunes directory and its RSS feed. MacParakeet resolves it to the audio and transcribes locally. - 3
Notes, quotes, and a searchable archive
Export TXT for notes, SRT or VTT for captions, JSON for structured workflows, or transcribe an entire season into a folder of searchable text you keep forever.
Prefer the terminal? One command does the download and the transcription:
$ macparakeet-cli transcribe --podcast "Lex Fridman episode 400" --format text
Install with brew install moona3k/tap/macparakeet-cli. Add more links and --output-dir to batch a whole list in one walk-away run. See the agent & CLI guide →
What "local" means here — honestly
To fetch a podcast link, MacParakeet downloads the audio from the source over the network — that step needs an internet connection. Everything after that is on-device: the speech recognition runs on your Mac's Apple Neural Engine via the Parakeet model, at roughly 155× realtime with a ~2.5% word error rate on English. Your audio is never uploaded to a transcription server, there's no account, and there are no per-minute caps.
Transcribe content you own or have the right to use, and respect each platform's terms of service. MacParakeet is a tool for getting text out of media you're allowed to access — not for redistributing other people's videos.
Frequently asked
Can I transcribe Spotify podcasts?
Public episodes with an RSS or Apple Podcasts link work. Spotify-exclusive or DRM-protected shows have no public download path, so they can't be transcribed this way — stick to shows with a public RSS or Apple Podcasts feed.
Can I search for an episode instead of hunting for a link?
Yes. From the CLI, run macparakeet-cli transcribe --podcast "Lex Fridman episode 400". It searches the iTunes directory, reads the show's RSS feed, and picks the episode by your hints (or the latest).
Can I paste an Apple Podcasts episode URL?
Yes. Paste the Apple Podcasts episode URL into MacParakeet, or use the CLI podcast search when you only remember the show name and episode. MacParakeet resolves the public feed audio, then transcribes it locally on your Mac.
Why use MacParakeet instead of Apple Podcasts built-in transcripts?
Apple's built-in transcripts are useful for reading inside Apple Podcasts when a transcript is available. MacParakeet gives you a full transcript file you can export, search, quote, batch, caption, summarize, or keep with your own notes.
Is there a per-minute cost like cloud transcription?
No. It's free and runs locally, so a 200-episode back catalog — which can cost hundreds of dollars on metered cloud services — costs nothing but a little compute time.
How accurate is it on a two-mic podcast?
Very accurate on clean, two-mic recordings — around 2.5% word error rate on English. Heavy music beds, phone-quality guests, or low-bitrate audio lower accuracy. Built-in speaker diarization labels who said what.
Get the transcript in a minute.
Free and open-source. Download MacParakeet, paste your podcast link, and keep the text.
macOS 14.2+ · Apple Silicon · GPL-3.0