Paste a transcript copied from YouTube’s captions panel — timestamps, line breaks, and all — and get it back as clean, readable paragraphs or properly formatted timestamped lines.
Paste a transcript above and click “Clean transcript” to see the formatted result.
The YouTube Transcript Cleaner reformats the raw transcript you copy from YouTube’s captions panel into something actually readable. Copied directly, a YouTube transcript comes out as a wall of alternating timestamp and text fragments with no punctuation and no paragraph structure — unusable for a blog post, show notes, or a quick re-read of what was said. This tool parses that raw paste (or an SRT/VTT subtitle file, or already-clean text) and rebuilds it into flowing paragraphs or clean timestamped lines, with duplicate caption lines and sound-effect tags removed. It’s built for creators repurposing a video into an article, editors searching a transcript for a specific quote, and anyone who’s tried to copy a YouTube transcript and given up on the result.
Open the video on YouTube, click the three-dot menu below the video (or expand the description), choose “Show transcript,” then click the three-dot menu inside the transcript panel and choose “Copy transcript,” or manually select and copy the lines.
Yes — auto-captions almost never include punctuation, which is exactly what the paragraph mode is built for: it breaks the text into readable paragraphs using sentence boundaries where they exist and word-count limits where they do not.
YouTube’s own transcript panel format (alternating timestamp and text lines), SRT subtitle files, VTT subtitle files, and plain text with no timestamps at all — the tool detects the format automatically.
No — all parsing and formatting happens in your browser with plain JavaScript. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored on a server.
Auto-captions often insert bracketed sound annotations like [Music], [Applause], or [Laughter] where there’s no speech. This option strips those out so they don’t clutter the cleaned transcript.
YouTube’s auto-captions sometimes repeat the same phrase across two consecutive caption frames as it “catches up” to speech. The cleaner detects and removes these exact-duplicate lines automatically.
Yes — check “Keep timestamps” to get one clean line per caption with its timestamp in brackets, useful for jumping back to a specific moment while editing.