Subtitle Edit on a Mac, and when you don’t need it

For years, the answer to “is there Subtitle Edit for Mac?” was no. Subtitle Edit, the free subtitle program many people swear by, was built for Windows, and Mac users had to run it through Mono or Wine, or look elsewhere.

That changed with Subtitle Edit 5, a rebuild that runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux. This guide shows how to install it on a Mac, what it is good at, how it compares with Aegisub, and when a browser editor gets a small job done faster.

What Subtitle Edit is

Subtitle Edit is a free, open-source program for creating, timing and fixing subtitles. It is known for doing a lot in one window: an audio waveform and spectrogram to time lines against the speech, speech-to-text with Whisper, OCR to turn image subtitles from DVDs and Blu-rays into text, spell checking, translation helpers, and conversion between a very long list of formats.

Version 4 was Windows-only. Version 5 was rewritten so that one program runs on all three systems. Because it is a rewrite, the look and some workflows differ from version 4, and a few of the older version’s features may still be missing or arrive later. Check the release notes if you depend on a particular one.

How to install Subtitle Edit on a Mac

1. Open the Releases page of the SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit project on GitHub. The release marked Latest is the stable one; those marked Pre-release are betas.
2. Under Assets, download the macOS .dmg that matches your Mac: ARM64 for Apple silicon (M1 and newer), x64 for older Intel Macs. If you are not sure, open the Apple menu, choose About This Mac and look at Chip or Processor.
3. Open the .dmg and drag Subtitle Edit into Applications.
4. Start it from Applications. Recent builds are signed and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens them like any other app.

The project lists macOS 12 Monterey as the minimum, with macOS 14 Sonoma or newer recommended. The media playback parts it needs come bundled, so there is nothing else to install.

Subtitle Edit, Aegisub or an online editor?

There are three free options worth knowing on a Mac. They are made for different jobs.

Subtitle Edit 5

• Install: yes, on Mac, Windows and Linux.
• Timing: against an audio waveform and spectrogram.
• Extras: speech-to-text with Whisper, OCR for image subtitles, spell checking, many quality checks.
• Best for: creating subtitles and timing a whole film.

Aegisub

• Install: yes, with native Mac builds for Apple silicon and Intel.
• Timing: against an audio waveform and spectrogram.
• Extras: full control of the .ass format: fonts, colours, positions, karaoke and other effects, as fansubbers use them.
• Best for: typesetting and styled subtitles.

Online Subtitle Editor

• Install: nothing. The Subtitle Editor on this site runs in any browser, also on a Chromebook or a phone.
• Timing: type a time, or set a line’s start or end from the moment you paused your video on.
• Extras: flags lines that overlap, never show, are empty or go by too fast to read; keeps .ass styles and .vtt settings as they were.
• Best for: fixing a few lines of a file you already have.

Which one to use

You are making subtitles from scratch, or timing a whole film. Install Subtitle Edit. The waveform lets you see where each sentence starts, and speech-to-text gives you a first draft to correct instead of typing every line.

You are styling anime or karaoke subtitles. Aegisub is still the specialist for positioning, fonts and effects.

You have a file that is nearly right. A name is misspelled throughout, one line comes in late, a translator’s note slipped into the dialogue. Installing a program for that takes longer than the fix. Open the file in the Subtitle Editor, change what is wrong, and download it in the same format. It also works on a work computer where you can’t install apps, on a Chromebook, or on your phone.

New to editing subtitles by hand? How to edit an SRT file covers the text-editor route and the five mistakes that break a file.

Other quick fixes that don’t need a program

Many jobs people install a subtitle program for have a one-step tool:

• Every line is early or late. Shift Subtitle Timing moves the whole file by the delay you enter. For subtitles that drift further off as the film goes on, see how to fix subtitles out of sync.
• A styled .ass file your TV won’t play. ASS to SRT turns it into plain SRT that every player reads.
• Letters shown as é or ?. Fix Subtitle Encoding saves the file as UTF-8.

All of them run in your browser on a Mac like on any other computer. Your files are read on your device and never uploaded.

Subtitle Edit and Aegisub are independent projects and are not affiliated with SubtitleMedic. Their names are used here only to describe them.