What is an Audio Minute?

To understand what is an audio minute, we first need to understand how transcription is done.

A friend of mine conducted an hour-long interview and sent it to an agency for transcription. The agency charges $25/hr for their services, so my friend was expecting a bill of $25. But when she got her transcript, she found she had been charged $60! What happened?

The agency wasn’t trying to fleece her. As explained in this post, a single hour of audio/video can take four to nine hours to transcribe. So while my friend’s interview recording was 60 minutes long, the agency took 4 hours to transcribe it, and therefore charged her for 4 hours of work i.e. $60.

So how does one know how much transcription work will cost? It is it even possible to predict how much one will be charged? To solve this problem, the audio minute was created.

What is an audio minute?

An audio minute is the time taken to transcribe 1 minute of a recording. As a rule of thumb:

1 Audio Minute = 4 Minutes

Of course this may change if the recording is particularly challenging, but in most cases this conversion is applicable.

With this conversion, it’s easier to estimate the cost of transcription. For e.g., if a transcription agency says they will charge $2.50 per audio minute, you can predict that you will pay say $150.oo for an hour long recording (plus taxes etc.) no matter how many hours it takes them to transcribe.

Some transcription service providers  quote an audio hour rate as well, for e.g. $75.00 per audio hour, which is just audio minutes converted to audio hours.

Paying by audio minute or audio hour offers the most transparency because no matter how long it takes to transcribe a recording, you would pay by length of the recording and not the hours worked or words/lines/pages transcribed.

That said, there rate per audio minute can vary depending on several factors such as audio quality, accents, subject, no. of speakers etc.

Read More: How Long Does it Take to Transcribe a Recording?