How to Batch Transcribe Multiple Files: 10 at Once

To batch transcribe multiple audio files in Listently, you need a Pro account: Pro lets you select or drag up to 10 audio files at once and queue them in a single action, while the Free plan uploads one file at a time and caps you at 3 transcriptions per day with a 40-minute limit per file. The practical workflow is: gather the week’s recordings into one folder, add any recurring names or product terms to your custom vocabulary first, select all 10 files, drop them into the uploader, and let the queue run. Each transcript comes back speaker-labeled with an AI summary, and you rename speakers afterward — the rename propagates everywhere, including the summary. Pro also removes the per-file length limit and raises uploads to 5GB, which matters when a “quick sync” turns out to be 70 minutes. If your recordings already live in Google Drive, Pro users can paste a share link and skip the download-then-upload step entirely. Free works fine for a couple of files a day; it does not work for clearing a backlog.

The bottleneck is the upload loop, not the transcription

Transcription itself runs in minutes. What actually eats your afternoon when you have 12 sales calls sitting in a folder is the loop: open uploader, click, navigate to folder, pick file, wait for the upload bar, confirm, go back, repeat.

That’s maybe 90 seconds of attention per file — and it’s attention you can’t spend on anything else, because each step is blocking. Twelve files is twenty minutes of clicking before any real work starts.

Batch upload collapses that loop into one action: select ten files, drop them once, walk away. The processing still takes however long it takes, but you’re not babysitting it file by file.

Free vs Pro: what actually changes for bulk work

	Free	Pro
Files per upload	1 at a time	Up to 10 at once
Transcriptions per day	3	Unlimited
Max file length	40 minutes	No limit
Upload size	2GB	5GB
Google Drive link import	No	Yes
Custom vocabulary terms	15	50
Price	Free	$8.99/mo annual, $13.99/mo monthly

The daily cap is the wall most people hit first. A week of research sessions is five to eight files; on Free that’s three days of rationing before you’ve even read anything. The 40-minute per-file limit is the second wall, since interviews and discovery calls routinely run past it.

We wrote a fuller breakdown of where the two plans diverge in Listently Free vs Pro: When You’ll Hit the Wall if you’re still deciding.

Step-by-step: clear a backlog with batch upload

This is the workflow we’d use for a week of sales calls or a round of user research sessions.

Collect everything into one local folder first. Recordings tend to scatter — Zoom’s folder, a phone voice memo, something a colleague sent you. Pull them into one place so you can select them all in a single file-picker action. Supported formats are MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC, OGG, MP4, MOV, and MKV, so video files go in directly without converting.
Rename files so you can tell them apart later. 2026-03-12-acme-discovery.m4a beats recording_4.m4a. The transcript inherits the filename as its title, and you’ll be scanning that list afterward.
Add your recurring terms to custom vocabulary before uploading, not after. Company names, product names, acronyms, and the names of people who appear in every call. Pro holds 50 terms. Doing this once ahead of a 10-file batch fixes the same misspelling ten times instead of you fixing it ten times by hand — see How to Set Up Custom Vocabulary for the specifics.
Select up to 10 files and drop them into the uploader. Ctrl/Cmd-click or shift-click in the file picker, or drag the selection straight onto the page. They queue together.
Leave it. Each file processes and lands in your library as a speaker-labeled transcript with an AI summary. There’s no need to keep the tab in focus.
Rename speakers once per transcript. Automatic speaker detection gives you Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on. Renaming them to real names updates the transcript and the AI summary together, so the summary reads “Dana raised pricing concerns” rather than “Speaker 2 raised pricing concerns.”
Export what you need. Word or PDF for sharing and note-taking, SRT/VTT if the source was video and you want subtitles.

Steps 2 and 3 are the ones people skip, and they’re the ones that decide whether the batch is usable or whether you spend the next hour cleaning up.

Pull files straight from Google Drive instead of downloading them

If your team’s recordings already sync to Google Drive — common with Zoom cloud recordings and shared research folders — Pro accounts can paste a Drive share link and Listently fetches the file directly. No download to your laptop, no re-upload.

For a backlog this matters more than it sounds. Downloading eight 500MB video files just to upload them again wastes bandwidth and disk space for no reason. The full walkthrough is in Transcribe Audio From a Google Drive Link.

Drive import and batch upload are separate paths — use the link import for files that already live in Drive, and the 10-file drop for anything sitting on your machine.

After the batch: search finds the phrase, not just the filename

The point of clearing a backlog usually isn’t to read ten transcripts end to end. It’s to answer a question across them: who mentioned the competitor, how many people complained about onboarding, which call had the pricing objection.

The library search box matches both transcript titles and transcript text content. Searching a phrase returns the transcript that contains it, even if the filename says nothing useful.

That changes how you work a backlog: transcribe everything first, then query it, instead of deciding in advance which recordings are worth transcribing. The AI summaries are a fast second pass — each one is generated from the actual transcript text and attributes points to specific speakers, and it’s instructed not to invent action items that weren’t said. We covered the limits of what summaries can and can’t do in What Teams Get Wrong About AI Meeting Summaries.

Working a backlog on Free: what’s actually possible

Free isn’t useless here, it’s just a different shape of job. Three transcriptions a day, 40 minutes each, one file at a time.

If your backlog is four short user interviews, Free clears it in two days at no cost. If it’s a week of hour-long sales calls, the length limit alone rules it out.

Some honest workarounds if you’re staying on Free:

Prioritize rather than process everything. Pick the three recordings most likely to contain what you need and transcribe those first.
Split long recordings before uploading so each piece fits under 40 minutes — though you’ll get separate transcripts with separate speaker labels, which you’ll have to stitch mentally.
Spend your 15 vocabulary slots on names only. Person and company names are what transcripts get wrong most visibly.

If you’re regularly splitting files or queuing tomorrow’s uploads today, you’ve already hit the wall and the math on Pro pricing is straightforward.

Batch-transcribing a week of calls assumes those calls were legally recorded. Consent rules vary by jurisdiction — some places require only one party to consent, others require all parties, and some workplaces have their own policies stricter than the law.

Check the rules that apply where you and the other participants are located before you record, not after you’ve got ten files waiting to transcribe. A recording announcement at the top of the call is the simple version that covers most cases.

Common questions

Can I batch upload video files, not just audio? The batch uploader accepts up to 10 audio files at once. Supported formats across the product include MP4, MOV, and MKV as well as MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC, and OGG.

Do all 10 files have to be the same language? No. Over 100 languages are supported, and each file is transcribed independently. A batch mixing English and Spanish sessions is fine — see How to Transcribe Audio in Another Language.

What happens to my audio after processing? Uploaded audio is deleted immediately after processing. Audio and transcripts are never used to train any AI model and never shared with third parties. More detail in Does Transcription Software Train AI on Your Audio?.

Can I fix mistakes after a batch finishes? Yes. Transcript text and speaker names are both editable after transcription completes, and renaming a speaker updates the AI summary too.

If you’ve got a folder of recordings you’ve been avoiding, start a free account and run the first few through — then decide whether the 10-at-a-time queue is worth it for the rest.