Methods to capture audio for import into Lingq

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I’ve been a Lingq subscriber for three years. It’s still the most essential learning tool I use. I have accumulated some tricks over the years to capture audio for input to Lingq. I also choose to continue to transcribe audio myself using Turboscribe. I’ve never hit a limit uploading my own audio and transcripts to Lingq. What are your favorite ways to capture audio for importing Lingq lessons?

Here are the tools I have used from the beginning until now. These days, turboscribe is the tool I use most of the time.

  1. Turboscribe. I use the .srt file for importing along with audio for perfect synchronized audio with text in Lingq. And if you get your audio from Youtube (or other supported services), all you need is a URL. Then you can also download the audio from Turboscribe for input into Lingq.

  2. YT Saver: I used this extensively before I started simply pasting YouTube URLs into Turboscribe. It’s fast and easy for YouTube. It supports other platforms, but I never used it for anything but YouTube.

  3. vb-Cable: I rarely use this these days, but if nothing else works, and you can play audio on your Mac or PC, you can use vb-Cable to pipe it into a recording tool like QuickTime Player on the Mac and then save the audio.

  4. Developer tricks: it helps to have some technical skills sometimes. On some sites, I can “view the page source,” find the audio file (like .mp3), click on it to open it in another browser tab, then click on the resulting player interface to download the audio. I also download Apple Podcasts to my Mac, and I use command line tools to find the audio for input to Turboscribe and then into Lingq.

  5. Advanced developer tricks: I have also taken advantage of some technical experience to convert files from one format to another. I used to convert mp3 files to ogg files for smaller files to upload to Turboscribe, and also convert them to “mono” (so many are larger stereo files) for faster upload to Lingq. Of course there are less technical ways to do this than calling “ffmpeg” from a command line, but I like to automate the process with scripts. So ffmpeg is invaluable to me.

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Thanks for sharing, How does turboscribe compare to vibe ?

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Looks interesting. I’d have to try it too see. The benefit of Turboscribe is that it’s an online platform that manages my transcriptions and provides seamless integration with Youtube. A do it yourself open source solution might work great. On the other hand I can access Turboscribe from all my devices, That’s worth the subscription price to me.

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I took another look at vibe. Could be fun to try. They say mobile is coming soon. What that means exactly, I don’t know. It’s still a tool to use when you want or need to do it yourself.

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The thing that bothers me for vibe is sometime, rarely though, it will transcribe something that is not in the audio and sometime repeat sentences. 90+% of the time it works fine. Does Turboscribe always have perfectly generated transcription?

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Pretty much. I don’t have stats. I’ve used it since January 2025. I create a lot of lessons from its transcriptions. I can think of one strange time that the transcription didn’t match the audio. Never did figure out why.

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ok sounds good.

Currently i don’t have anything to transcribe but the free plan on turboscribe should be enough when need transcription.
free plan has 3 transcription per day at 30mins each.

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I’ve been using Whisper on Google’s Colab, but it was a pain to set up and I was only able to do it with the help of more knowledgable LingQ user. If it ever breaks again, I’m going to be switching to Turboscribe.

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