October 2, 2026 // bogs // essay

The Nifty Things 2anything Does Besides Converting Files

When I wrote about 2anything I focused on the obvious part: PDFs, images, data files, the everyday format friction. But a convertor does not have to stop at "this format to that format". Sometimes the most useful conversion is from one kind of thing to a completely different kind of thing. Speech into text. Text into speech. Sound into a picture. A video into a single image. These are the features I use more than I expected, and they all happen on your own machine.

Speech to Text Is Meeting Notes Without the Meeting

Everybody has a folder of voice notes and recordings they will never listen to again. A meeting you recorded. A lecture. An interview. A rambling idea you dictated while walking. The information is in there, but audio is a terrible format for finding anything. You cannot search it, skim it, or paste a paragraph of it into an email.

So 2anything transcribes audio into text. Plain TXT if you just want the words, or SRT and VTT if you want subtitles with timestamps. Drop in the recording, pick the output, and get something you can actually read. Record the meeting, convert it, and you have notes you can search, edit, and send to the people who missed it.

The part I care about most is where this happens. Meeting recordings are exactly the kind of file you should not upload to a random website. Client calls. Internal planning. Interviews with people who did not agree to have their voice sent to a stranger's server. If a recording is private enough to record, it is private enough to transcribe locally.

The subtitle output is useful in the other direction too. Got a video and need captions? Transcribe the audio to SRT or VTT and you have a subtitle file ready to go with it.

Text to Speech Turns Reading Into Listening

This is the reverse trick, and it is my favorite. There is a lot of good writing I never get to because I never have time to sit down and read it. But I do have time to listen. On a drive. On a walk. While cooking.

2anything turns text and Markdown into audio files. So take a long blog post, an essay, an article you saved, or your own draft, convert it, and you have an audio file you can put on your phone and play in the car. A long read becomes a commute. No subscription to a read-aloud service, no account, no article pushed through somebody's cloud to come back as an mp3.

It is also a surprisingly good proofreading tool. Your own writing sounds different when somebody else reads it to you. Awkward sentences and repeated words show up immediately. If you write anything at all, listen to it once before you publish it.

Audio to Image Is Seeing What You Hear

This one sounds like a novelty until you need it. 2anything can turn audio into a waveform image, and into a spectrogram as well.

A waveform is the shape of the sound over time: loud parts, quiet parts, gaps, bursts. That makes it useful for a podcast cover or a quick visual for a social post. It is also useful for the boring jobs. Is there a long silence in this recording? Where does the interview actually start? Did the microphone cut out halfway through? One glance at a waveform answers questions that would take minutes of scrubbing.

The spectrogram goes further and shows frequency over time. If you work with sound, you already know why you want it. If you do not, it is still a lovely way to look at a bird recording, a piece of music, or that strange hum in your voice memo that you could not place.

Video to Image Is a Whole Clip on One Page

Scrubbing through a video to find the part you want is slow. Opening a video editor just to look at what a clip contains is slower. So 2anything can turn a video into a contact sheet: a grid of frames pulled from across the timeline, assembled into a single image.

That one picture tells you what is in the video. Skim it and you know where the interesting part is, which clips are duplicates, and which one is just thirty minutes of a closed lens cap. Editors use it to review footage. Designers use it for reference boards and mood boards. Anyone with a folder of screen recordings can use it to remember which one had the thing they were looking for. You can review an hour of footage in the time it takes to look at a poster.

You Do Not Have To Know the Steps

Here is the part that ties all of this together. 2anything does not only do one-step conversions. Under the hood it keeps a graph of every converter it has, and when there is no direct path from what you have to what you want, it finds a route through the intermediate formats itself.

Take a video podcast and ask for the transcript. There is no single converter that turns a video straight into text, but there is a path if you go the long way: pull the audio out of the video first, then transcribe that audio to text. 2anything works that out for you. You asked for text, so you get text. You never had to realise that extracting the audio was a step, let alone do it yourself.

The same routing happens all over the tool. A scanned PDF to Markdown goes through OCR. A blog post you want to hear in the car goes from text to audio. A recorded meeting becomes searchable notes by way of audio and a transcript. You name the start and the end, and the app fills in the middle.

None of these are tricks. They are ordinary jobs that people have been sending to websites for years, usually with a signup form, a file size limit, and a quiet hope that nobody keeps a copy. They belong on your own machine, next to the files they are about.

The Point

A good utility should surprise you with how many of your small, annoying jobs it quietly covers. You should be able to turn a meeting into notes, an article into something to listen to, a recording into a picture of itself, and a video into a contact sheet, without thinking about where your files are going. Convert almost anything to almost anything, and keep it all at home.

2anything is available now for macOS at 2anything.app, with a free 7-day trial.