How to transcribe and organise old family recordings

Not every family starts from zero. Many already have cassette tapes, voice notes on a phone from a birthday or a family lunch, or loose recordings someone made years ago without thinking too much about it. The problem is usually not a lack of material, but that it's scattered, untranscribed, and unbacked up.

First, rescue the original format

A cassette tape or an audio file on an old phone has a limited lifespan. Before organising it, it's worth converting any physical format into a digital file and keeping at least one copy in two different places: a computer's hard drive and a cloud service, for example. Losing the original is the scenario to avoid first.

Transcribing isn't just writing down what you hear

A useful transcript isn't word for word if that makes it unreadable: people hesitate, repeat themselves, and correct themselves as they speak. It makes more sense to clean up the text slightly without changing what was said, and to note any doubts separately — a name that's hard to make out, an imprecise date — to check with the family later.

Always keeping the audio alongside its transcript, not just the text, makes it possible to confirm later that nothing was distorted along the way.

Organise by person and topic, not just by date

A folder full of files named “audio1”, “audio2”, and “final recording (2)” is almost as useless as having nothing at all. Organising by who's speaking and what topic — childhood, work, a specific trip — makes it far easier to find something later than sorting only by recording date.

From loose audio to a story that makes sense

This is exactly where many families get stuck: they have the material, but not the time or the judgement to turn it into something readable. At Vozever, every recorded answer is transcribed, linked to its original audio, and organised by question and by person from the start, so that ordering work doesn't depend on someone doing it manually in their spare time.