Whisper on Older Machines (Blog 164)

(3/29/2025) Still on vacation from politics. It’s the same. There isn’t really much to talk about outside of what I have already been talking about for the past 8 or so years. When I have thoughts I will share them. In the meantime I have been using some AI-powered software on my workstation that might be worth exploring.

Over time, I’ve had a lot of friends—mainly lady friends—dealing with exes. Custody battles, property disputes, or just other general ‘he said/she said’ that tends to be nonsense. In today’s culture, people record everything on their phones, but what happens when you actually need those recordings in text format for a lawyer or court proceedings? Or maybe you’re a student with an MP3 of a lecture that needs converting into notes. AI-powered transcription tools exist, but most good ones come with subscription fees that, while not outrageous, still don’t justify the cost for everyday use. What if you could do all of this locally, fairly quickly, and for free? Now that’s worth something.

A few months ago, I ran a local AI voice cloning experiment with SoVITS. This time, I took on a different challenge: transcribing audio to text using Whisper—without relying on paid services, without selling my data, and most importantly, without needing a quantum supercomputer. In theory, this should’ve been easier on my hardware. In reality? Not so much. Between failed installations, dependency conflicts, and an aging PC that should be retired, this turned into a fight between me and modern software that assumes everyone is running hardware from the future. But in the end? I won. Whisper now runs locally on my outdated machine—and does so efficiently. No cloud services. No hidden paywalls. Just raw processing power and the right setup.

This essay-style tutorial documents the entire process: the software hurdles, the workarounds, the commands, and the optimizations required to make this AI model work on hardware that the industry considers obsolete. Also this could be used if one has a newer configuration. The only real differences is version numbers of software needed and how to navigate around CMD, PowerShell and/or Python’s CLI.

Whisper on Older Machines — https://mineofilms.me/whisper-2
by David-Angelo Mineo
5,068 Words
00:30:58 Audio/Video