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Show HN: CastLoom Pro – Turn podcasts into a personal knowledge base (toolooz.com)
10 points by MikeLuLu 17 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
Hi HN,

I’m Ethan, an indie developer.

I listen to a lot of podcasts while coding or commuting, and I often want to save interesting insights from episodes. I tried tools like MacWhisper for transcription, but it only works on macOS and the workflow didn’t quite fit what I wanted.

So I built CastLoom Pro.

It’s a desktop app that lets you search, play, download, transcribe, translate, and archive podcasts in one place. The idea is to turn podcasts into something searchable and reusable instead of just passive listening.

Some details:

- Search podcasts from Apple Podcasts - Batch download episodes - Local transcription using Faster-Whisper - Optional translation with DeepL or OpenAI - Export to Markdown / SRT / TXT / JSON - Send transcripts to Notion or Obsidian

Everything runs locally, so audio and transcripts stay on your machine.

It currently supports Windows and macOS.

I’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions.



In playing with the exact same use case, I was blown away at how good Gemini (flash 2.5 IIRC) transcoded podcasts with speaker identification and handled common "overlaps" in conversations. I can't remember what local Ollama models I played with but was not very impressed.


Yeah, Gemini is really strong at speaker separation and handling overlaps.

I’m taking a local-first approach (privacy, offline, no cost), using Faster-Whisper




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