Transcribing one audio file is easy now: Whisper is open source and very good. Transcribing podcasts is still annoying:

You first have to find the MP3 behind the episode (Apple Podcasts and Spotify pages don't show it).

Episodes are long. OpenAI's Whisper API rejects files over 25 MB, so a one-hour episode has to be split first.

Running Whisper yourself means a GPU or a slow laptop, plus ffmpeg, plus a script to turn the output into subtitles.

Here's the trick for the first problem, and a tool that handles the rest.

Every podcast has a public RSS feed

Almost every podcast is published through an RSS feed, and each episode in it has an <enclosure> tag with the direct audio link:

<item> <title> Politicians are afraid to fix taxes. So 100 citizens tried.…