Export guide
You have months (maybe years) of Zoom recordings with transcripts sitting in the cloud. This guide walks you through getting them all out — starting with the simplest method and working up to full automation.
Zoom Pro or higher required. Cloud recordings (and their transcripts) are only available on paid Zoom plans. The free plan does not support cloud recordings. If you have been on a free plan, your recordings are stored locally on your computer — no export needed, they are already there.
Cloud Recording + Auto-Transcription must be enabled. These settings need to be turned on at the account or admin level. Go to Settings → Recording → Cloud Recording in your Zoom web portal. If automatic transcription was not enabled when a meeting was recorded, there will be no transcript file for that recording.
File format: Zoom saves transcripts as .VTT files (Web Video Text Tracks). This is a subtitle format that includes timestamps and speaker text. Moat handles .VTT files natively — no conversion needed.
Step 1
Go to zoom.us and sign in. You must use the web portal, not the desktop app, to manage recordings.
Step 2
In the left sidebar, click Recordings, then select the Cloud Recordings tab. Use the date range filter to show all recordings — set the start date as far back as needed.
Step 3
Use the checkbox at the top to select all recordings on the current page. Then click the Download button. Zoom will package the selected recordings and their .VTT transcript files for download.
Zoom paginates results (usually 30 per page). Work through each page: select all, download, next page, repeat. For an archive of 100–200 recordings, this takes 10–15 minutes.
If you are a Zoom admin (or can ask your admin), the admin portal provides additional export capabilities that go beyond individual user accounts.
Navigate to Admin → Account Management → Reports. From here, you can generate reports and access recordings across the entire organization. Check Settings → Recording → Cloud Recording for admin-level export options that can pull recordings and transcripts in bulk for all users on the account.
This is especially useful for teams where meetings are scattered across multiple host accounts. The admin view lets you see and export everything in one place.
For large archives (500+ recordings) or recurring exports, the Zoom API is the most efficient approach. The key endpoint is List All Recordings (GET /users/{userId}/recordings), which returns a list of all cloud recordings with download URLs for each file, including .VTT transcripts.
A typical workflow:
.VTT file using the provided download URLsFull API documentation: Zoom List All Recordings API
This method requires some programming knowledge, but it is the only way to fully automate transcript export for large or ongoing archives.
Cloud Recording and automatic transcription must be enabled at the account/admin level before a meeting is recorded. If transcription was off when a meeting happened, there is no transcript to export — the audio was never processed. Also: Zoom's free plan does not support cloud recordings at all.
Moat handles .VTT files natively — no conversion needed. Once you have downloaded your folder of .VTT files, just share the folder with us and we can run analysis across your entire archive.
Yes. Cloud recordings (and their .VTT transcripts) require Zoom Pro or higher. The free plan only supports local recordings. If you recorded locally, the transcript file is already on your computer in the Zoom recordings folder — no export needed.
VTT stands for Web Video Text Tracks. It is a subtitle format that includes timestamps and speaker dialogue. This is the standard format Zoom uses for cloud recording transcripts. It looks like a text file with time codes. Moat reads .VTT files natively, so there is nothing to convert.
Local Zoom recordings are already saved on your computer, typically in a Zoom folder inside your Documents directory. Each meeting gets its own subfolder. If you had transcription enabled, the .VTT file is in that subfolder alongside the video file. No export step is needed — just find the folder and copy the files.
Using the multi-select method, you can download one page of recordings at a time (typically 30). For larger archives, you will need to repeat across multiple pages. The Zoom API has no practical limit — it can pull thousands of recordings programmatically.
Or skip the export step entirely — try the Moat Mac app and import directly.