CastLoom Pro
Turn podcasts into a personal knowledge base
Details
- External ID
- 47394797
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- CastLoom Pro
- Website domain
- toolooz.com
- Launched
- March 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 10
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5781057810578106
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai voice dictation and transcription tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- podcast to knowledge base converter
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 85 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #40 of 86 (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
- podcast-deep-dive · github · 2026-09-23 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- drea · hn · 2026-05-18 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Podeo.ai · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Invader · hn · 2026-08-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- ListenDock · hn · 2026-03-30 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I launched a podcast to interview makers · hn · 2025-12-10 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.