I really like the MacWhisper macOS desktop app - https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper
It runs Whisper (or the newer Whisper Turbo) really well, and you can both drop MP3/MP4/etc files into it or paste in URLs to a YouTube video/podcast URL to kick off a transcription. It exports to text or VTT subtitles or a bunch of other formats. I use it several times a week.
I was surprised to find my old PC with a GTX1080 could transcribe/diarize about 10x faster than my m1 Mac. If anyone reading this is looking to transcribe 100s of hours of audio, do the extra work to get it set up on desktop with a dedicated graphics card.
Was the M1 using its GPU cores? It should have more power than a 1080.
Does macwhisper utilize metal GPUs by default or is it something you have to tick?
Oh wow if I can batch process a list of remote audio URLs with macwhisper, then this would be perfect! Will check it out!