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
whisperpackage depends ontorch, and PyTorch wheels for Python 3.8 vs 3.12 are completely different installs - Users on 3.12 running
pip install openai-whisperwill 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.frozenpatterns — 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.
