CastLoom Pro
Turn podcasts into a personal knowledge base
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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 ObsidianEverything 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.
HN · launched Mar 16, 2026 · 10 upvotes (top 42%) · 0 views
Niche: podcast tools and platforms · 76 launches, 5 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Search & retrieval
- B2C
- AI feature
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 76 launches in podcast tools and platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes The core app downloads RSS podcast audio streams, runs Whisper locally (via whisper.cpp or similar wrappers), and stores the transcripts in an SQLite/vector database with standard search UI.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Gemini (Flash 2.5), Faster-Whisper, Ollama
Concerns raised: Local models struggle with speaker separation and overlaps, Privacy and cost concerns with cloud solutions
Feature requests: Better speaker identification and overlap handling in local models
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 199 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #87 of 200 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 137 days after the earliest competitor.
- Steadcast · hn · 2026-04-10 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- Repodify · ph · 2026-09-21 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- CastTranscript · ph · 2026-10-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- podcast-deep-dive · github · 2026-09-23 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Metapodcast · ph · 2026-10-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- CastPulse: Podcast Production · ph · 2026-11-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Feedcast · ph · 2026-10-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- drea · hn · 2026-05-18 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.49
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.