JMM’s notes on

Whisper.cpp

Misc notes from trying it out

Trying on NixOS (an old version) on Linode. Couldn’t download a model, probably huggingface is rate limiting or blocking VPSes. 

[nix-shell:~/whisper1]$ whisper-cpp-download-ggml-model base.en
Downloading ggml model base.en from 'https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp' ...
^C

Instead I downloaded ggml-base.en.bin from huggingface directly (see links) and then just scp’d it with scp ggml-base.en.bin remote-nixos:whisper1/

Convert stuff to WAV using FFmpeg: 

ffmpeg -i somefile.ogg -ar 16000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le somefile.wav

Here’s how to run it from a newer nix shell (since I was running an older version): 

nix repl --file "<nixpkgs>" -I nixpkgs=channel:nixos-25.11
:u whisper-cpp
whisper-cli -m ggml-base.en.bin -f somefile.wav

I suppose I should mention the reason I was trying it remotely is that the local computer I was trying it on is so old that I remember it historically not working due to missing AVX instructions. That was years ago (pandemic times, I think), and now in April 2026 it turns out that the above works on my old machine now too. I guess someone updated the Nix derivation or upstream source to not require AVX, or work around missing instructions. Cool.