Convert FLAC to text
Lossless recordings (field interviews, oral history, studio sessions) transcribed directly, with no conversion step.
Free: 60 min per 30 days, files up to 30 min / 50 MB · Paid plans: 10 to 100 hrs, files up to 2 GB. Big video? Upload just its audio track: same transcript, much faster upload.
Encrypted in transit · audio & video auto-delete in 30 days · never used to train AI
Optional settings
Set this for the most accurate result on quiet or mixed audio.
Get a second copy translated into another language (Pro).
Uncommon words the AI might misspell. List them so they come out right.
Last updated 21 July 2026
FLAC is where careful recordings live: field interviews captured on dedicated recorders, oral-history archives, studio sessions, anywhere someone chose lossless because the recording mattered. Trustample transcribes FLAC directly. In our testing, files straight off a handheld field recorder, 16-bit and 24-bit alike, went through the pipeline with no conversion step, so archival audio goes from folder to searchable text without touching the lossless master.
One expectation worth setting: lossless audio doesn't meaningfully out-transcribe a decent lossy file of the same recording. Accuracy lives in the recording itself (microphone distance, room noise, crosstalk), not the container's bitrate. Keep FLAC for archival integrity; just don't expect it to rescue a recording made from across the room.
The workflow FLAC users tend to want is archival: keep the master where it lives, upload a working copy, and let the transcript become the searchable index of the collection. Timestamps make that pairing work, because a passage found in text points back to its exact moment in the audio. On our side, the uploaded copy is held for at most 30 days and then auto-deletes, while transcripts stay until you delete them. The transcript outlives the working copy, and the master never leaves your archive. The same flow suits interview projects recorded lossless in the field.
How it works
- 1Upload the .flac file directly. No conversion to MP3 or WAV is needed.
- 2The AI transcribes it with punctuation and timestamps, in the background.
- 3Verify names against the audio, then export TXT, DOCX, PDF or subtitles.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Will FLAC give me a more accurate transcript than MP3?
Marginally at best. Speech models are trained on real-world audio and extract the same words from a 192kbps MP3 as from lossless. What moves accuracy is the recording: mic placement, background noise, how much people talk over each other. FLAC's value is archival rather than transcriptional, which is still a fine reason to record in it.
FLAC files are big. Will they upload?
An hour of uncompressed FLAC can run past the free plan's 50 MB / 30-minute file cap, so on the free tier upload a shorter clip or a compressed copy; paid plans take files up to 2 GB. On slow connections a compressed copy gets the same transcript faster, and you keep the FLAC as your master.
Is this suitable for oral-history and archival projects?
Yes. Time-stamped transcripts pair naturally with archived audio, speaker labels come on every paid plan, and the uploaded file auto-deletes from our servers after 30 days while your transcripts remain until you delete them. Your FLAC masters stay wherever you archive them; we only ever hold the working copy.
What about other lossless formats like ALAC and WAV?
WAV has its own page and uploads directly. ALAC (Apple lossless, usually in .m4a) also transcribes directly via the M4A path. If a rare container ever fails, one conversion to FLAC or WAV with any free audio tool solves it.
Do high-resolution FLACs (24-bit, 96 kHz) need downsampling first?
No. High bit depths and sample rates upload and transcribe as they are, and speech recognition gains nothing above standard rates, so there is no accuracy reason to touch the file. The only reason to downsample or compress first is upload size on a slow connection; the words come back the same either way.
Can it handle a session split across several FLAC files?
Yes. Upload them together and the jobs queue in the background with automatic retries, each file becoming its own transcript. Name them with a shared prefix (session plus part number works well) so the dashboard sorts them together. There is no automatic merging, so a single combined document is a paste-together in your own editor at the end.
An honest note: FLAC preserves exactly what the recorder captured, including its problems. A clipped lavalier, an echoing room or a subject seated too far from the microphone transcribe no better lossless than lossy, because the information was never in the signal. When an archival file transcribes poorly, the limitation was in the recording session; budget the editing pass by the recording conditions, not the file type.
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