Just Press Record is a nice little app for recording voice memos, available on macOS, iOS and watchOS.

It has the ability to automatically embed transcripts into the recordings. I wanted to extract these out to use with an automated workflow for OmniFocus, a task manager.

With a little bit of investigation, I could see the transcript was represented as a Base64 string contained in JSON. Here’s how to extract it:

strings recording.m4a | tail -n 1 | sed 's/^[^\{]*//' | jq -r '._root.txscriptv2.tx._data' | base64 --decode

A brief explanation of how each command is used:

  • strings to extract any text found within the file
  • tail to keep only the last line (the one with the JSON)
  • sed to discard the part of the line before the JSON structure
  • jq to extract the specific part of the JSON containing the encoded text (the -r flag removes the quotes).
  • base64 to decode it