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About

A practitioner's second track.

SecondTrack is a searchable, transcribed, cross-referenced archive of DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries: director, cinematographer, screenwriter, scholar, and cast tracks from the home video era. The audio commentary is one of the richest bodies of practitioner knowledge in cinema, and almost none of it is currently searchable, transcribed, or indexed.

Physical media is being deaccessioned. Studios are quietly removing bonus content from streaming reissues. The corpus lives only on discs, and the disc market is shrinking. SecondTrack converts personal libraries into durable, searchable text before the medium turns over again.

Posture

  • Transcripts and metadata only. No commentary audio is hosted or linked. The site is text-first.
  • Personal library only. Every commentary is transcribed from a disc owned by the project.
  • Fair use for research and criticism. Same posture as Genius for lyrics or Wikipedia for quoted books.
  • Release metadata as citation. Each commentary names the disc edition it was transcribed from, as a bibliographic reference, not a link.

How transcripts are produced

Commentary caption tracks authored by the studio are the primary source when present. Speaker-labeled, professionally transcribed, and already aligned to film timecode. For titles without caption tracks, the commentary audio is transcribed with OpenAI Whisper large-v3 and cleaned via a pipeline that flags repetition loops, strips common hallucinations, applies proper-noun corrections, and cross-references the film's subtitle track to tag bleed-through dialogue.

Affiliate disclosure

Links labeled "Amazon" on commentary and film pages are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, SecondTrack earns from qualifying purchases. The links point to Amazon's standard search results for the film; they do not influence which commentaries are archived or how they are presented.

DMCA / takedown

Transcripts are fair use for research and criticism. If you believe specific content should be removed, contact contact@secondtrack.org. Receive, log, review, respond within 7 days.