Free Mac Apps Convert Audio To Text

So I surfed the Internet carefully and came across several good apps which could convert audio files (in MP3, WMA or M4A formats) into text docs automatically. Now I’m happy to share them with you. UPD: Voicebase used to be the best voice to text solution for many years. Unfortunately, since 2019 it’s no longer a free audio to.

by Christine Smith • 2020-07-09 18:30:12 • Proven solutions

FLAC, short for Free Lossless Audio Codec, not only offers the same quality as the original audio file but takes up much less space on your hard drive. However, its limited compatibility often pushes people to convert FLAC to MP3 or other more widely-used audio formats. Such inconveniences seem to be exaggerated for Mac users as Apple devices can't recognize nor play it. To help you out, we collect 6 FLAC converters for you to convert FLAC to Mac supported formats without any hassle.

Part 1. Recommend FLAC Converter to Convert FLAC Video on Mac/Windows

If you want to convert your FLAC audio file with great and high-quality results, then Wondershare UniConverter (originally Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate) is the best FLAC converter for Mac and Windows. It stands out among other video converter programs with 30X times faster speed without quality loss. If you often visit video-hosting sites like YouTube, you'll love their one-click download, which allows you to download videos directly for offline playback.

Wondershare UniConverter - Best FLAC to MP3 Converter

  • Convert FLAC to MP3 and other 1000+ audio formats like M4A/WAV/M4B/AAC with simple steps on Mac.
  • Compress FLAC files to a smaller size without losing any quality.
  • Download YouTube videos and playlists to MP3 and other audio formats by pasting URL.
  • Edit FLAC audio files before converting with trimming and adjusting volume.
  • Transfer audio and video files from Mac to iPhone/Android devices easily via a USB cable.
  • Convert FLAC audio files in batch with super fast speed.
  • Versatile toolbox combines fix video metadata, GIF maker, cast video to TV, CD burner, and screen recorder.
  • Supported OS: Mac OS 10.15 (Catalina), 10.14, 10.13, 10.12, 10.11, 10.10, 10.9, 10.8, 10.7, 10.6, Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista.
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Audio

How to Convert FLAC to MP3/AIFF with Wondershare FLAC Converter

The following guide will show you how to convert FLAC files on Mac within 3 simple steps.

Step 1 Add FLAC Audio to Convert

Launch Wondershare FLAC Converter on your Mac, then click the Add Files button on the upper left to add FLAC video that you want to convert to MP3. Or you can also directly drag and drop your desired FLAC audio to the FLAC to MP3 converter.

Step 2 Choose MP3/AIFF as Output Format

Click on the down arrow button on the Target tab and choose MP3 or other audio formats as you like under the Audio tab. The output audio quality can also be chosen here. If you want to batch convert all FLAC files to the same audio format, then you can click on the Convert all tasks to option on the right-top corner to choose your audio format and quality.

Step 3 Start Converting FLAC to Other Formats

Now click on the Convert All button to start converting FLAC to MP3, AIFF, or any format you want on your Mac system, the converting process will be finished within a few seconds, and you can switch to the Converted tab to locate the converted .flac files on your Mac.

Tips

If you want to know how to play FLAC files directly, here are Top 30 Flac Player for Windows/Mac/iOS/Android >> you cannot miss.

Part 2. 5 Common Free FLAC Converters for Mac

1. All2MP3

Key Features: Using AppleScript, this MP3 audio converter converts PC, APE, WV, FLAC, OGG, WMA, AIFF, and WAV files to MP3, which is one of the most popular and compatible audio formats available.

Pros:

  • It's free
  • Easy to use
  • Supports drag and drop

Cons:

  • It can only convert to MP3, which excludes many other, better, Apple compatible formats with better quality
  • You can't convert large batches of FLAC files at once

2. Switch Audio File Converter Software

Key Features: Switch is a free audio converter program that converts multiple audio formats, including FLAC to MP3. Its paid version offers more versatility, but the free one is limited to converting only to MP3.

Pros:

  • It is totally free to use
  • Various formats can be converted
  • Easy to use

Cons:

  • The free version only converts to MP3, limiting your options
  • Additional features are only free to try out
  • It installs additional software behind your back

3. X Lossless Decoder

Key Features: This music converter can decode, convert, or play various 'lossless' audio formats on Mac OS, and help to convert FLAC to MP3 and other more compatible audio formats.

Free Mac Apps Convert Audio To Text On Android Phone

Pros:

  • You can choose from multiple output formats when converting
  • It's free

Cons:

  • Interface is complicated
  • You can only convert lossless audio formats, which limits its functionality

4. MediaHuman Audio Converter for Mac

Key Features: MediaHuman Audio Converter is a free FLAC converter that helps you convert FLAC to AIFF, AAC, WAV, OGG, WMA, and other popular or lossless audio formats.

Pros:

  • It's 100% free to use
  • It supports multiple file conversion at once
  • You can use it to extract audio track from videos

Cons:

  • This program is not easy to use
  • Slow and unreliable at times

5. fre:ac

Key Features: fre:ac is a professional FLAC converter Mac, which combines free audio converter and CD ripper into one for Mac OS. Apart from FLAC, it also supports MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, AAC, WAV, OGG, and Bonk audio formats, to which you can convert your FLAC file.

Pros:

  • A totally free FLAC converter program
  • Integrated option to rip audio CDs

Cons:

  • Supports a few audio formats

Part 3. External Knowledge on Limitation of Free FLAC Converter

It doesn't take a genius to notice that almost any free FLAC converters share the following limitations although they are easy to use:

  • Various limitations prevent you from enjoying the full features of FLAC converter Mac
  • Slower converting speed than desktop FLAC converters, especially when converting large or multiple files
  • Poor support of development results in unstable user experience
  • Inevitable audio quality loss after free FLAC conversion

Different from free FLAC converter, Wondershare UniConverter provides an ultra-fast and smooth experience of converting FLAC to MP3 Mac. Seeing is believing, come to give it a free shot!

OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a sophisticated software technique that allows a computer to extract text from images. In the early days OCR software was pretty rough and unreliable. Now, with the tons of computing power on tap, it’s often the fastest way to convert text in an image into something you can edit with a word processor.

These ten applications offer different takes on the task of OCR, without a price tag and across multiple platforms. If you’ve been looking for a way to turn pictures into words, you’ll almost certainly find the best free ocr software you need below.

FreeOCR (Windows 10)

Convert Speech To Text

FreeOCR is a basic free OCR software that offers all the core functionality you’d want from this type of software. For starters, if you have a TWAIN scanner (which is basically all of them) you can directly scan and extract text from paper. Image imports work as you’d expect as well. This includes multi-page documents in TIFF and PDF format as well.

FreeOCR uses an Open Source engine originally developed by Hewlett Packard and eventually released by Google for everyone to use. It’s known as “Tesseract”. Tesseract has some neat features, but one of the most interesting is its automatic layout detection system. This means you don’t need to spend time tediously drawing rectangles around discrete blocks of text.

Free Mac Apps Convert Audio To Text In Microsoft Word

SimpleOCR (Windows 10)

SimpleOCR is a basic OCR package that can convert typed documents into text, directly from your scanner. The name, SimpleOCR, is quite literal in this case. If you have documents that exhibit any form of complexity, such as columns or that don’t have perfectly crisp scans, SimpleOCR can’t get the job done.

Of course, Simple Software is happy to sell you a more sophisticated solution for a few bucks, but if you just want to OCR some standard blocks of text, this is one option that won’t cost you a penny and is as simple to use as the name suggests. As a bonus, it supports handwriting recognition!

Easy Screen OCR (Windows, Mac, iOS & Android)

Easy Screen OCR is a small, best free OCR software that relies on a cloud-based, Google-powered recognition engine. As you might expect, this means that you need to have an active internet connection for the software to work. If that’s not an issue, you’ll find quite a useful tool here.

This OCR application is intended to extract text from screenshots, letting you copy text from websites or any other text that’s on-screen. What’s particularly cool about this is the support for more than 100 languages. If you want to translate (for example) Japanese text, you can simply take a screenshot and have Easy Screen OCR do it for. If this is something you need to do often, it also helps that you have the option to set custom hotkeys.

While this is not a traditional OCR application, there are plenty of workflows around these days that involve extracting text from the images you’re working with. Easy Screen OCR makes that task as easy as a few keystrokes.

Unfortunately the latest version of the software (1.4.2 and up) requires a subscription fee after 20 uses. However, older versions of the software are still free to use.

Capture2Text (Windows 10)

Capture2Text is an interesting little application with a narrow, but very useful function. It’s used to OCR text from what’s currently on your screen. You press a hotkey, select the zone of the screen you want to OCR and then it sends the result directly to the clipboard, so you can paste it into a word processor.

Capture2Text is a portable application, so you don’t need to install it. Just run the executable and you can use it on any Windows system from version 7 and up. The software is Open Source as well, so you can copy and modify it as you like, as long as you comply with the terms of the GNU license.

It’s not fancy by any means, but if you want to rapidly grab text from images that you are handling, this is a great piece of software to do it.

A9t9 (Windows 10)

If you’ve never ventured onto the Windows Store, you may be surprised to find that there are actually plenty of free and Open Source applications there. The a9t9 app is just such a gem and comes with no strings attached at all. There are no adverts and it promises pretty robust OCR performance.

A9t9 supports quite a long list of languages, although not as extensive as some of the other options on this list. If you’re a Windows 8.1 (or up) user who needs OCR right now and don’t want to spend any money, then simply click a single button on the Windows Store app and seconds later a9t9 will be processing your images into documents you can edit.

Adobe Scan (Android & iOS)

Adobe has an absolute ton of mobile apps out in the wild. Some are pretty great, while many seem to be little more than experiments. Adobe Scan falls into the former category. It’s a polished camera scanning and OCR application that will run on either Android or iOS. There’s no charge and you don’t need to be subscribed to any Adobe services.

Of course, the final document is a PDF, which you can only directly edit with a paid version of Acrobat, but copying the text over to a word processor of your choice is no hassle, if we’re being honest.

One of the best features of the Adobe OCR software is its ability to recognize handwriting. Of course, good quality handwriting will be better recognized. Don’t expect it to decipher something you can’t read yourself. Like your doctor’s prescription notes.

There are a few other reasons to try out Adobe Scan. The ability to automatically scan, OCR and contacts from a business card is very cool. In fact, if you spend a lot of time meeting people, it could save you a heck of a lot of time.

The app also has, as you’d expect from the creators of PhotoShop, a small set of touch-up tools. So you can clean up the images before trying to extract text from them.

Office Lens (Android & iOS)

When the first phones with built-in digital cameras came to market the quality on offer was truly awful. The resulting images weren’t really useful for anything and you certainly couldn’t make out fine detail such as text.

House drawing apps for mac. Today, the sophisticated cameras found on even budget models offer high-resolution images that are good enough to use as a replacement for a document scanner. For example, the Google Drive app lets you make some pretty good scans using nothing but your phone camera.

The Office Lens app by Microsoft not only lets you scan documents, it allows you to OCR them on the fly. So you could take a snap of someone’s business card and immediately have the text ready to copy into your contacts list.

Office Lens is a standalone application, but its functionality is being built into other MS Office apps as well, so if you’re already using those it may not be necessary to download this independent app. Then again, sometimes a focused, lightweight app is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Free Mac Apps Convert Audio To Text Online

English OCR (iOS)

English OCR is a free OCR app for iPhone and iPad that makes it pretty easy to quickly take a snap of a document and convert the text in the photo into a digital format. It’s released under an Open Source licence, but the developers use adverts to help carry the costs of developing and supporting the application.

Convert Text To Audio Online

There is a paid “Pro” version that has exactly the same functionality as the free edition. The only difference is that the Pro version removes all adverts. So if you are OK with a few ads, you don’t need to put any money down at all.

Reading Between The Lines

The promise of a paperless world has, so far, failed to materialize. Which means OCR technology will remain an important part of the bridge between the digital and analogue worlds.

Armed with the OCR apps above, you should never have to laboriously retype a document ever again and, best of all, they won’t cost you a cent.