Bulk Podcast Transcription

A show with 200 episodes has hundreds of hours of original material and, usually, zero transcripts. That means no transcript pages earning search traffic, no accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, and no way to search the archive for what was said and when. Transcribing episodes one at a time — export the file, upload it, wait, repeat 200 times — is why it never gets done.

Castmagic does it from the feed. Paste your podcast RSS feed URL and Castmagic lists every episode in the catalog. Select the ones you want — a season, the top 50, or the entire archive — and import them in bulk. Each episode runs through the full transcription pipeline: speaker labels, word-level timestamps, 60+ languages with auto-detect, plus AI-generated show notes for every episode. An hour-long episode typically processes in 3-5 minutes, and imports run as background jobs, so a whole catalog churns through without you babysitting it.

Why back catalogs stay untranscribed

The math is brutal at one-episode-at-a-time. Two hundred episodes through a manual upload flow is two hundred rounds of export, upload, wait, download, file. Human transcription services price per audio minute, so a back catalog quotes out at thousands of dollars. So most shows transcribe nothing, or only new episodes going forward — and the archive that took years to build contributes nothing to search traffic or accessibility.

RSS import collapses the per-episode overhead. The feed already lists every episode with a direct link to its audio. Castmagic reads the feed once, you select in one pass, and the pipeline handles the rest in the background.

What every imported episode comes back with

Each episode gets the standard Castmagic treatment: a full transcript with speaker labels and word-level timestamps, AI-generated show notes, an episode summary, and chapter markers. Transcripts export in six formats — TXT, SRT, VTT, PDF, DOCX, CSV — so the same import feeds your website's transcript pages, your video captions, and your internal archive.

For agencies and podcast networks

If you manage shows for clients, bulk import changes the onboarding economics. A new client with a 150-episode archive used to mean weeks of file wrangling; now it's one feed URL and a selection pass. Networks run each show in its own Castmagic space, keeping catalogs separate per client, and deliver transcript pages, show notes retrofits, and repurposed social content from the back catalog as a standard line item. The first deliverable for a new client can be their own archive, made useful.

A searchable archive, not just a pile of text files

Once the catalog is transcribed inside Castmagic, Magic Chat works across all of it. Ask "which episodes did we discuss pricing in?" or "what has this guest said across their three appearances?" and get answers grounded in the actual transcripts, pulled via semantic search across the space. For a show with years of material, that's the difference between remembering an episode exists and finding the exact quote in it.

Keeping up after the backfill

The same flow handles ongoing episodes: when new episodes land in your feed, paste the feed again, select the new ones, and import. Many teams batch this weekly or monthly alongside their publishing workflow, so the archive never falls behind again.