How to Download Investor Presentation Audio Files

In this technical article, we’ll explore the process of downloading investor presentation audio files from conference hosting software. Often, these presentations are made available via webcasting services, and accessing them for offline review or transcription can be invaluable. We’ll use a specific example to illustrate the process, breaking it down into manageable steps.

Step 1: Identifying the Audio File Source

Webcast services often use HTML5 <audio> tags to embed audio content directly within web pages. Here’s an example of what the HTML code might look like:

<div id="player-media">
    <div id="player-media-container">
        <audio webkit-playsinline="true" controls="true" src="blob:https://www.gowebcasting.com/9734b78d-defd-414d-b1d1-eb693a76b151"></audio>
    </div>
</div>

The src attribute within the <audio> tag holds the key to locating the audio file. Although it appears as a blob URL, this is merely a pointer to the audio data generated dynamically by the web server.

Step 2: Finding the Direct Audio File URL

To download the audio file, we need to locate its direct URL. This URL is often not directly visible in the HTML source due to dynamic content loading strategies used by web applications. However, it can typically be found by inspecting the network traffic via your browser’s Developer Tools:

Open Developer Tools (usually accessible with F12 or right-click → “Inspect”).
Go to the “Network” tab and filter by “Media” or “XHR” requests.
Play the audio on the web page to trigger the loading of the audio file.
Look for requests fetching media content, such as an M3U8 playlist file.

For example, you might find a URL resembling:

https://5b54b4fce3488.streamlock.net/vods3/_definst_/mp4:amazons3/gowebflash/scotiabank/scotiabank_240227p1.mp4/playlist.m3u8

This URL points to an M3U8 playlist, commonly used for streaming audio and video content.

Step 3: Downloading the Audio File

With the direct URL to the M3U8 file, you can use command-line tools like ffmpeg to download and convert the audio to a standard format. Here’s how you might do it:

ffmpeg -i "https://5b54b4fce3488.streamlock.net/vods3/_definst_/mp4:amazons3/gowebflash/scotiabank/scotiabank_240227p1.mp4/playlist.m3u8" -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc "scotiabank_240227p1.mp4"

This command tells ffmpeg to download the audio stream referenced by the M3U8 playlist and save it as an MP4 file, preserving the original audio encoding.

Step 4: Transcribing the Audio to Text

Once you have the audio file, you may want to transcribe its content to text for easier analysis or accessibility. While there are many tools available for this task, one convenient option is the Whisper model available through Hugging Face Spaces:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/whisper-web

By uploading the audio file to this space, Whisper can generate a text transcription of the audio content, leveraging advanced machine learning models to provide accurate results.

Conclusion