Descript Alternative
the transcript, not the editor
This one needs saying before anything else. Descript is an editor: it cuts video by cutting the words, records screens, and repairs audio. None of that is here and none of it is coming. What is here is the transcript and the subtitle files, free. If that was the only reason the subscription was still active, this replaces it. If you cut video by editing text every day, it does not.
What you stop paying
| Descript, every month | |
| This page, every month | $0 |
The interesting part is what gets sent. Every product in this category makes you upload the whole video and wait for it. Here the soundtrack is separated on your own machine and only that is sent, so a two gigabyte video becomes a few megabytes of sound and the upload mostly stops being the slow part.
How to switch
- 1
Bring the video
MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV. The file is read, never changed and never uploaded.
- 2
The sound is separated here
Your own machine pulls the soundtrack out and drops the picture, so the video itself stays where it is.
- 3
Take the words or the subtitles
Plain text, text with times, or SRT and VTT files with the cue times already set.
FAQ
- Can I edit the video by editing the text?
- No. That is Descript’s whole trick and it is a good one. This gives you the words and the timings; the cutting is yours to do.
- Is my video uploaded?
- No, the video is not. Your machine separates the soundtrack and only that is sent. Yes. It goes to our servers, gets processed, and is dropped. It is not stored, not logged, and never used to train anything. We keep no copy: there is no database in this app to keep one in.
- Are the subtitle times any good?
- Yes. The cue times come from word level timings rather than being spread evenly across a sentence, which is what makes cheap subtitle files drift out of sync by the end of a paragraph.
- Is there a length limit?
- No. Long audio is cut into pieces at quiet moments and handled a few at a time. Very long videos can be heavy to open in a browser tab; if one fails, save the sound out separately and use the audio tool instead.
Get the transcript without the subscription
The video stays on your machine. Only the sound is sent.
Open Video to TextThe other five
Descript is a trademark of its owner. This page is a comparison, not an affiliation, and the price quoted is their own published rate.