What each option does
- Strip Timestamps: removes markers such as [00:00], (01:23), [1:02:03], and times at the start of a line.
- Remove [Music] & Sounds: removes bracketed or parenthesized sound cues such as [Music], [Applause], (Laughter), and [Cheering].
- Merge Fragmented Lines: joins short caption lines into paragraphs, starting a new paragraph at a blank line or at the end of a sentence once the paragraph is a few lines long.
- Whitespace is always tidied, so doubled spaces and stray blank lines are removed.
What it deliberately doesn’t change
The cleaner never rewrites words. It won’t remove “um” and “uh”, add missing punctuation, or fix misheard words, because doing so automatically would risk changing what was said. That makes the output safe to quote. For readability edits, clean first, then edit by hand or ask an AI assistant to add punctuation without changing the wording.
Works on any transcript text
You can paste text from anywhere: YouTube’s own transcript panel, a copied subtitle file, or another transcription tool. The cleaned result can be copied or downloaded as a TXT file. Everything runs in your browser, so the text you paste isn’t uploaded.