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How to transcribe a Zoom recording locally

Where Zoom saves a recording on Windows and Mac, which file to use, how to download a cloud one, and how to transcribe a Zoom recording without uploading it.

By FreeTranscribe 8 min read

To transcribe a Zoom recording locally, find the recording folder (by default Documents\Zoom on Windows and Documents/Zoom on a Mac), pick the audio-only file that starts with audio and ends in .m4a, and drop it on a transcriber that runs in your browser instead of on a server. If the meeting was recorded to Zoom’s cloud, download it from the web portal first. The recording never leaves your computer. This guide covers each step, including what to do with a meeting that has several speakers.

Where Zoom keeps a local recording

Zoom calls a recording saved to your machine a computer recording. It is available on a Basic (free) account or above, and only from the desktop app on Windows, macOS or Linux; the mobile apps only record to the cloud. During the meeting the host, or a participant the host has allowed to record, clicks Record in the meeting controls and, if a menu appears, picks Record on this Computer.

When the meeting ends, Zoom converts the recording and then opens the folder that holds the files. If you closed that window, the default location is C:\Users\[Username]\Documents\Zoom on Windows, /Users/[Username]/Documents/Zoom on a Mac, and home/[Username]/Documents/Zoom on Linux.

You can also get there from inside the desktop app. On the Home tab, click Open recordings below your list of meetings. Zoom switches to the Hub tab and shows My files then Meeting recordings; click the Computer recordings tab. Hover over a recording, click the ellipsis, and choose View file location. If someone has moved the default folder, the app’s Settings, Recording tab shows Storage location under Local recording storage, with Open and Change buttons.

Zoom’s documentation gives the default names of the files inside:

  • video[number].mp4: the audio and video together. Zoom’s example is video98796876.mp4.
  • audio[number].m4a: the same audio with no video. This is the file to transcribe.
  • chat.txt: the in-meeting chat messages, if that option was on.
  • audio[Name][number].m4a: one file per participant, inside an Audio Record folder, if the host turned on Record a separate audio file for each participant before the meeting.

Download a cloud recording if that is what you have

Cloud recording is for licensed users on a Pro, Business or Enterprise account, and it is the only kind you can start from a phone. The host picks Record to the cloud during the meeting, and afterwards Zoom processes the recording, usually for about twice its length and occasionally up to 24 hours.

To get the files onto your computer, sign in to the Zoom web portal and click Recordings & Transcripts in the navigation menu, then the Cloud recordings tab. Click the recording’s thumbnail, click Download, and click Download again to confirm. Zoom lists MP4 and M4A among the file types a cloud recording can produce, plus a .vtt transcript and a .cc.vtt caption file when those features are on. Whether you get a separate M4A depends on the Record audio-only files setting under the portal’s Recording & Transcript tab, which Zoom describes as recording one audio file for everyone, one per participant, or both.

If there is no M4A, use the MP4. Our transcriber reads only the audio track and ignores the picture; the file is just bigger to load.

In short:

Recording type Where it lives Which file to transcribe
Computer recording, one mixed track Documents\Zoom (Windows) or Documents/Zoom (Mac), one folder per recording audio[number].m4a
Computer recording, separate tracks The Audio Record folder inside that recording’s folder One audio[Name][number].m4a per participant
Cloud recording Zoom web portal, Recordings & Transcripts, Cloud recordings tab; download it The M4A if Record audio-only files was on, otherwise the MP4

What Zoom’s own transcript feature offers

Zoom can produce a transcript itself, with two conditions stated on its support pages. The account has to be Pro, Business, Education or Enterprise, and the meeting has to be a cloud recording. Zoom’s page on the setting says it “only applies to cloud recordings, not computer recordings that are saved to your device.” With a local recording or a free account, the rest of this guide is the route.

If you do qualify, the setting lives in the web portal under Settings, on the Recording tab, under Advanced cloud recording settings, where you tick Create audio transcript and save. A greyed-out box means an admin has locked it at account or group level. Once a recording is processed, open it under Recordings & Transcripts and click the thumbnail; the transcript appears on the right in timestamped sections. You can hover over a phrase and click the pencil icon to correct it, show the text over the video like closed captions, or download it as a VTT file and open that in a text editor.

Transcribe the Zoom recording without uploading it

Meeting recordings are exactly the kind of file people are reluctant to hand to a third party: client names and salary discussions. Our transcriber runs OpenAI’s open-source Whisper model on your own graphics card through WebGPU, so the browser reads the recording from disk and it never leaves your machine. No account, no length limit.

  1. Open the site in desktop Chrome or Edge. It does not work in Firefox or Safari yet, or on phones.
  2. Drop the audio[number].m4a file onto the page, or the MP4 if that is all you have.
  3. The first time, the browser downloads the speech model, about 200 MB, and caches it.
  4. Wait. In our test, 71 seconds of audio took 41 to 50 seconds on a desktop with a graphics card, including the model load. A thin laptop takes roughly as long as the recording itself, so a one-hour meeting takes about an hour.
  5. Read it through before relying on it. Names, product jargon, heavy accents and a colleague on a bad headset are where it slips, and meetings have plenty of all four.

Two limits before you start. The tool is English only for now. And it uses the base version of the model, chosen so it runs on ordinary hardware rather than for top accuracy, which is one more reason to proofread.

Getting a usable transcript out of a multi-speaker meeting

The transcript comes out as one continuous stream of text. The tool does not label who said what, and nothing in it tries to guess. For a two-person call you can usually tell from context. For a six-person planning meeting, a wall of unlabelled dialogue is hard to use as minutes.

The fix is on Zoom’s side, and it has to happen before the meeting. For a local recording, turn on Record a separate audio file for each participant in the desktop app’s Settings, Recording tab; Zoom then writes each person’s track as audio[Name][number].m4a in the Audio Record folder, for example audioJohnSmith98796876.m4a. For a cloud recording, the equivalent is Record audio-only files with the per-participant option. Transcribe each file on its own and every transcript is one person’s words, with the name in the filename.

To merge them back into one conversation, export each as SRT rather than TXT. The timestamps all count from the same meeting start, so you can open the files side by side and interleave the cues by time. It is manual work, but where attribution matters it beats guessing.

If the meeting was recorded as one mixed track, transcribe it and add speaker names by hand where they matter, using the video to check.

Export to TXT for notes or SRT for the video

Once the transcript is on screen you get three export buttons.

TXT is for notes, minutes and search. It is the plain words with no timing, and it pastes cleanly into a document, an email or a ticket. This is the one most people want from a meeting.

SRT is for the video. Drop the file next to video[number].mp4 in a player like VLC, or upload it with the video to a platform that accepts subtitles, and the recording gets captions. Our exporter builds cues to 42 characters a line, two lines a cue, one to six seconds each. If you have never handled one before, how to make an SRT file explains the format and the small mistakes that make players reject it.

VTT is the same idea for HTML video on a web page. You are unlikely to need it unless you are embedding the MP4 on your own site.

Frequently asked questions

Does Zoom transcribe local recordings? Not according to its support pages. Zoom’s audio transcription is described as a cloud recording feature, and the page for enabling it says it does not apply to computer recordings saved to your device. A local recording needs a separate tool.

Which file should I transcribe, the MP4 or the M4A? The M4A. It is the same audio as the MP4 without the video, so it is smaller and loads faster. If there is no M4A, the MP4 works; only the audio track is read.

I recorded on my phone. Where is the file? Zoom’s mobile apps only record to the cloud, so there is no file on the phone. Sign in to the web portal on a computer, open Recordings & Transcripts, and download it from the Cloud recordings tab.

Will the transcript tell me who was speaking? No. If you need that, record separate audio per participant in Zoom before the meeting and transcribe each track on its own, as described above.

Sources, checked 14 September 2026

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