WebSocket & Batch APIs both fail with valid audio — no transcript / HTTP 400

[Brownrf386]

Hi all,

I’m building an app using Deepgram’s STT APIs and I’m encountering consistent failures in both the WebSocket and Batch Upload APIs, even with valid audio that transcribes fine in Whisper and plays cleanly.

WebSocket issue:

• I'm using the following "Configure" message:
  {
  "type": "Configure",
  "features": {
  "language": "en-US",
  "model": "general",
  "encoding": "linear16",
  "sample_rate": 16000,
  "channels": 1,
  "punctuate": true
  }
  }
• Audio is mono, 16kHz, 16-bit PCM
• I stream ~250ms chunks (~8000 bytes) with await ws.send(...) and await asyncio.sleep(0.1) pacing
• The stream closes cleanly (1000 OK)
• Deepgram responds with:
  { "type": "Metadata", "duration": 0.0, "channels": 0 }
• Transcript is always ""

Batch Upload issue:

• I send mono 16kHz 16-bit PCM WAV files created using Python’s wave module
• Files play fine locally and transcribe in Whisper
• I use httpx with multipart/form-data to upload
• Deepgram responds with:
  HTTP 400 — Bad Request: failed to process audio: corrupt or unsupported data

What I’ve tried:

• Confirmed audio plays normally
• Verified WAV headers and byte structure
• Ensured Content-Length is set correctly
• Tried both chunked and full-buffer approaches

Would love to know if anyone has run into this — or if Deepgram has updated requirements recently.

Thanks,
Ron

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[deepgram-community[bot]]

It looks like we're missing some important information to help debug your issue. Would you mind providing us with the following details in a reply?

• A request ID that triggered your error or issue.

[Brownrf386]

Hi, Thanks so much for your help. We’re seeing repeated 400 errors using Deepgram’s Batch Upload endpoint. Our audio files are ~1 second to 10 seconds, mono 16kHz WAV, generated in-memory. Here are two request IDs from failed uploads: e9f2b651-d716-4cf7-b808-e5f7bf5328a8 09feb3a5-f9ed-4c6e-88b9-9089076bfee3 Can you tell us what’s wrong with the payloads or format?

…

-Ron

On Jun 24, 2025, at 5:27 PM, deepgram-community[bot] ***@***.***> wrote: It looks like we're missing some important information to help debug your issue. Would you mind providing us with the following details in a reply? A request ID that triggered your error or issue. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1301 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/BSCOL5GA2LU6PYFIRJX6M6L3FG7C7AVCNFSM6AAAAACABQI7B6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTGNJWGY3TAMI>. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.

[deepgram-community[bot]]

I looked at request ID e9f2b651-d716-4cf7-b808-e5f7bf5328a8 and I see this in our Logs:

Error: Raw binary data was sent to Deepgram without both the encoding and sample_rate set.

Suggestion: Set both the encoding and sample_rate in your query parameters.

for 09feb3a5-f9ed-4c6e-88b9-9089076bfee3 i see in our logs:

I see the same error:

Error: Raw binary data was sent to Deepgram without both the encoding and sample_rate set.

Suggestion: Set both the encoding and sample_rate in your query parameters.

Refer to our Docs on using these API params:

https://developers.deepgram.com/docs/encoding
https://developers.deepgram.com/docs/sample-rate

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