Too bad the consequences of their idiocy spill over into Nevada, which gets its gas from California. Time to get more serious about diversifying our sources, perhaps?

California Faces High Pump Prices As Phillips 66 Shuts LA Refinery (ZeroHedge)

I ran across this post on running Whisper WebUI under Docker a while back and had it up and running for a while. Something broke in a recent release, though, and I tend to prefer command-line tools for things, so I went looking for alternatives.

The tools Whisper WebUI runs under the hood have command-line equivalents available. In particular, there’s insanely-fast-whisper-cli. Getting it running wasn’t particularly difficult…if anything, it was easier than getting GPU compute running within Docker containers:

git clone https://github.com/ochen1/insanely-fast-whisper-cli
sudo mv insanely-fast-whisper-cli /opt
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /opt/insanely-fast-whisper-cli
python -m venv /opt/insanely-fast-whisper-cli
source /opt/insanely-fast-whisper-cli/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install torch==2.7.0 torchvision==0.22.0 torchaudio==2.7.0 --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/whisper-cli
#!/usr/bin/env bash
source /opt/insanely-fast-whisper-cli/bin/activate
python /opt/insanely-fast-whisper-cli/insanely-fast-whisper.py "$@"
EOF
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/whisper-cli

This uses a downgraded torch (v2.7.0) that I need to use whisper-cli with my GeForce GTX 1070. If you have a newer card, you can probably leave out the pip install torch==2.7.0... bit.

Once all this is in place, you can then use something like whisper-cli foo.avi to produce foo.srt.

You might find sometimes that background music confuses Whisper. There’s another tool for that: vocal. Installation is even simpler:

sudo mkdir /opt/vocal
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /opt/vocal
python -m venv /opt/vocal
source /opt/vocal/bin/activate
pip install vocal
pip install torch==2.7.0 torchvision==0.22.0 torchaudio==2.7.0 --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/vocali
#!/usr/bin/env bash
source /opt/vocal/bin/activate
vocali "$@"
EOF
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/vocali

vocali -i in.mkv -o in.mp3 will produce a file with all of the background music stripped out. Vocals will be retained, as will anything spoken in a normal voice.