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Ah, that must have been it, I didn't anticipate this at all. Since this Whisper Batch Transcriber was built while on Win7, I used Python 3.8, the last version that still worked on that OS, so its much older than even your python install - and now in hindsight of course most people aren't going to have that python version installed commonly, hence this conflict. Gah. I thought the program would work universally on all python versions 3.8 and above.

Well that sucks.

I asked Claude Code what the issue could be and it gave me this answer:

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(I gave it the 'whisper_transcriber.py' file to analyze.)

Looking at your code, I can see a few potential issues on Python 3.12, though honestly it's pretty clean overall. Here's what to watch out for:

Actual Problems

1. AudioSegment.from_file() with certain formats (indirect issue) Not Python 3.12 specific, but pydub depends on ffmpeg being installed externally. This hasn't changed, but newer pydub versions have stricter error messages — worth noting in your docs if you haven't.

2. subprocess.check_output() in check_vram() — minor but real

result = subprocess.check_output(['nvidia-smi', ...]) result.decode('utf-8').strip() 

On Python 3.12, this still works, but the bare except: swallows everything including KeyboardInterrupt. Not a crash risk, but bad practice that bites harder in 3.12 since it's stricter about interrupt propagation in some contexts. Should be except Exception:.

The Real Culprit for User Issues

whisper itself and its dependencies are the likely problem, not your code. Specifically:

• OpenAI's whisper package depends on torch, and PyTorch wheels for Python 3.8 vs 3.12 are completely different installs
• Users on 3.12 running pip install openai-whisper will get a different (newer) torch version, which can behave differently
• numba (a whisper dependency) had broken 3.12 support for a while and required >=0.59.0

What's Actually Fine

• All f-strings, os.path, shutil, sys.frozen patterns — all fine in 3.12
• time, file I/O, encoding='utf-8' — no issues
• The getattr(sys, 'frozen', False) PyInstaller pattern — still works

Recommendation

Add a version check at the top and pin your dependencies in a requirements.txt:

import sys if sys.version_info < (3, 8) or sys.version_info >= (3, 13):     print("Warning: This script is tested on Python 3.8–3.12 only.") 

# requirements.txt openai-whisper>=20231117 pydub>=0.25.1 torch>=2.0.0 numba>=0.59.0 

The bare except: in check_vram() is the only real code-level fix needed. Everything else is dependency/environment friction, not your Python syntax.

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I dunno if that's useful tbh.

I think you're ultimately right, I need to take down this project since its only going to work on a niche installation setup - because I didn't understand python properly at the time.

I'll make the much better Parakeet based version in the future to replace it, Whisper is already very dated anyways.