Podcast Transcript Scraper - RSS & Apple Podcasts to Text

Turn any podcast episode into a full, timestamped text transcript. Paste an RSS feed, an Apple Podcasts show or episode link, or a direct audio file URL and get the transcript, sentence-level segments with timestamps, and ready-to-use SRT and VTT subtitle files - plus the episode's title, date, description and audio link. Works in 100+ languages with automatic language detection.

What you get

One dataset row per episode with:

• Transcript: transcript (full text), segments (start, end, text in seconds), wordCount, language, minutesTranscribed
• Subtitle files in the run's key-value store: srtUrl, vttUrl, txtUrl
• Episode metadata: episodeTitle, episodeGuid, episodeUrl, publishedAt, seasonNumber, episodeNumber, description, durationSeconds, audioUrl, audioType, audioBytes
• Show metadata: podcastTitle, podcastAuthor, podcastFeedUrl, podcastImageUrl

Export to JSON, CSV, Excel or Google Sheets from the Apify console, or pull the dataset via API.

Use cases

• Content repurposing - turn episodes into show notes, blog posts, newsletters and social clips
• Podcast SEO - publish transcripts alongside episodes so search engines can index the spoken content
• Research and monitoring - search what was said across a show's back catalogue or track mentions of a brand or topic
• Accessibility - generate SRT/VTT captions for video versions of your podcast
• AI pipelines - feed clean, timestamped transcripts to summarisers, RAG systems and agents

How to use

1. Paste one or more Podcast URLs: an RSS feed (https://feeds.example.com/show), an Apple Podcasts show link (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736), an Apple Podcasts episode link (with ?i=), or a direct .mp3 / .m4a file URL.
2. Set Episodes per feed (newest first, default 1) and optionally Episode title contains to pick specific episodes.
3. Optionally cap Max minutes per episode (e.g. 15 to transcribe only the opening) and set a Language hint.
4. Run the actor. Transcripts appear in the Dataset tab; SRT, VTT and TXT files appear in the Key-value store tab.

Output example

{
  "status": "ok",
  "podcastTitle": "The Daily",
  "podcastAuthor": "The New York Times",
  "episodeTitle": "The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-18T09:45:00.000Z",
  "durationSeconds": 2292,
  "minutesTranscribed": 39,
  "language": "en",
  "wordCount": 5820,
  "transcript": "From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily...",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 0, "end": 4.8, "text": "From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro." },
    { "start": 4.8, "end": 6.9, "text": "This is The Daily." }
  ],
  "srtUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/The-Daily-The-Techno-Religion....srt",
  "vttUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/The-Daily-The-Techno-Religion....vtt",
  "txtUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/The-Daily-The-Techno-Religion....txt"
}

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee per episode plus a fee per minute of audio transcribed (rounded up). Free-plan users get 10 minutes of transcription per run; upgrade to any paid Apify plan to remove the limit.

FAQ

Which sources are supported? Any public podcast RSS feed, Apple Podcasts show and episode links, and direct audio URLs (MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, OGG, FLAC, MP4). Spotify does not expose podcast audio, so Spotify links are not supported - use the show's RSS or Apple link instead.

How long can an episode be? Up to 500 MB per file (roughly 8 hours of MP3). Long episodes are processed in chunks with continuous timestamps.

How accurate are the timestamps? Segments are sentence-level with start/end times accurate to about a second, suitable for subtitles, chaptering and quoting.

Can I transcribe a whole back catalogue? Yes - set Episodes per feed to the number you need (up to 200 per run) and schedule the actor for new episodes.

Do I get speaker names? Not in this version. Segments are in speaking order without speaker labels.