Turn a lecture recording into searchable study notes
A ninety-minute lecture is easy to record and painful to revisit. Scrubbing through audio to find the five minutes where a concept was actually explained wastes the study time you were trying to save. Once the recording becomes text, you can search for the exact term from the exam review sheet and read the explanation in seconds.
Every transcript comes back with timestamps, so when the text alone is not enough, you can jump back to the precise moment in the recording where the professor worked through the example. Paste the transcript into your notes app, highlight what matters, and keep the audio timestamps as your index into the original lecture.
Which export format fits lecture notes
For most students, plain TXT is the right choice: a clean, readable transcript you can drop into Notion, Obsidian, Google Docs, or whatever holds your course notes. The timestamps let you cross-reference the audio whenever a passage reads ambiguously on paper.
If your class recordings are video, such as screen captures of slides with the lecturer's voice, export SRT or VTT instead. Those load as caption tracks in a video player, so the words appear on screen in sync while you rewatch. Pro accounts also add DOCX export if you want a formatted document to share with a study group.
What about full-length lectures and online recordings
The free first file covers up to ten minutes and fifty megabytes, which is enough to trial a section of a lecture or transcribe a short review session. A free account raises that to thirty minutes and one hundred megabytes, and Pro, at twelve dollars a month, handles files up to two gigabytes and five hours, comfortably covering even a double-length seminar.
FastScribe works on files you upload, not links. If your lecture lives on a university streaming portal or was a recorded video call, download the recording to your device first, then upload that file. Pro adds batch uploads and a priority queue, useful when you are clearing a whole semester's backlog before finals, and keeps your transcript history forever.
Frequently asked questions
Is it okay to transcribe a lecture I recorded in class?
That depends on your university's and your professor's recording policies, which vary by institution and country. If you had permission to record the lecture for personal study, transcribing your own recording is simply another way of taking notes from it.
Can I jump from my notes back to the audio?
Yes. Every transcript includes timestamps, so when a sentence in your notes needs more context, you can seek directly to that moment in your original recording and hear the full explanation again.
My lecture recordings are on the university's video portal. Can FastScribe pull them from there?
No, FastScribe only accepts files you upload. Download the recording from the portal to your computer first, then upload that file, and the transcription works the same as with any local recording.
Do you keep my lecture recording after transcription?
No. The audio is deleted the moment your transcript is ready. Only the text transcript is kept, so you can come back to reread, search, and export your notes any time.
Will the transcript be perfect?
No transcription is flawless, and lecture halls add echo, distant microphones, and technical vocabulary. Our own transcription engine handles real-world recordings well, and the timestamps make it quick to check the audio wherever a word looks off.