From choppy captions to clean text

YouTube captions are cut into short lines so they fit on screen. Copied as-is, they read like this:

[00:12] so the first thing
[00:13] [Music]
[00:14] you want to do is
[00:15] check the settings

TubeToTranscript can turn that into plain, readable text:

so the first thing you want to do is check the settings

Two ways to get there

• Straight from a video: paste the link, turn timestamps off, and copy or download the text. See transcripts without timestamps.
• From text you already have: paste it into the Transcript Cleaner. It works on text from YouTube's own transcript panel, subtitle files, or other tools, and runs in your browser.

What the cleaner changes

• Removes timestamps such as [00:00], (01:23), and times at the start of lines.
• Removes sound cues such as [Music], [Applause], and (Laughter).
• Merges short caption lines into paragraphs.
• Tidies doubled spaces and stray blank lines.

What it leaves alone, on purpose

It never rewrites words: no removing "um", no guessing punctuation, no fixing misheard words. That keeps the text faithful to what was said, so it's safe to quote. If you want polished prose, clean first, then edit by hand or ask an AI assistant to add punctuation without changing the wording. Keep a timestamped copy too, in case you need to check a line later.