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About this tool
Total up your voice memos and see the real review time at your playback speed, plus sessions, days to clear the backlog and file size.
The Audio Note Duration Budgeter totals a list of voice memos and converts that raw duration into the time it will really take to deal with them: listening time is the total divided by your playback speed, review time multiplies that by a factor covering pausing, rewinding and writing notes, and transcription time is the raw audio multiplied by your typing ratio. It then converts the result into review sessions, days at your daily capacity, and days to clear the queue while new recordings keep arriving. Useful for anyone whose voice-memo folder has quietly become a second inbox.
Open Audio Note Duration Budgeter on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Upload or drag in the file you want to work with.
Adjust the settings and preview the result.
Download the finished file to your device.
Counts the pausing and note-writing that make a 45-minute recording cost far more than 45 minutes.
Compares your daily review capacity against your daily recording habit and says whether the backlog can ever clear.
M:SS, H:MM:SS or plain minutes all parse, so you can copy figures straight out of your recorder app.
Longer than an hour of playback in almost every case. At 1.5x speed an hour of audio is 40 minutes of listening, but once you add pausing, rewinding and writing things down — a review factor of about 1.5 — it is closer to an hour of real work. Measure one session honestly and use your own factor.
Roughly 4 minutes of typing per minute of clear, single-speaker audio is the usual planning figure, so a 45-minute call is about 3 hours. Poor audio quality, crosstalk or several speakers pushes it to 6:1 or worse, which is why timestamped, speaker-separated recordings pay for themselves.
It halves the playback duration, but not the total work: you still stop to write things down, and at higher speeds you rewind more often, which is exactly what the review factor is for. Playback speed reduces listening time, while the review factor is applied on top of it.
Multiply the bitrate by the duration and divide by 8: an hour at 128 kbps is about 57.6 MB, while the same hour at 64 kbps is about 28.8 MB. Speech is intelligible at far lower bitrates than music, so dropping to 64 kbps for voice memos halves storage with little practical loss.