Steadcast
Free Mac podcast player for learning, not background noise
Details
- External ID
- 47717565
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Steadcast
- Website domain
- steadcast.co
- Launched
- April 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 7
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.38817480719794345
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hey HN — I'm Aaron, and I built Steadcast because I was frustrated that I listen to 15+ hours of podcasts a week and retain almost none of it.Steadcast is a native macOS podcast player (Swift, SwiftUI, AVFoundation — no Electron) designed around one idea: podcasts are how a lot of us learn now, but no podcast app actually treats them that way.What makes it different:• Learning domains, not genres. The app is organized around 10 knowledge domains (AI, science, history, philosophy, psychology, etc.) with 90+ editorially curated shows. No true crime, no celebrity gossip.* On-device transcription. Every episode gets transcribed locally using the macOS 26 Speech framework. Every word becomes searchable. No cloud processing, nothing leaves your Mac.•AI summaries. Apple Intelligence generates summaries that capture the key ideas from each episode.• Memories. Press Ctrl+Cmd+K while listening and Steadcast saves a timestamped bookmark with the full transcript context around that moment. So when you hear something worth remembering, you can actually find it later.• Smart Speed. Intelligent silence trimming with a live counter showing exactly how much time you've saved.• Keyboard-first. Global hotkeys, full keyboard navigation — built for people who work at their Macs all day.It's free on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/steadcast/id6760033638Requires macOS 26. Built as a solo project. I'd love feedback on the curation approach especially — is a podcast app that has opinions about what you should listen to a feature or a bug?
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai voice dictation and transcription tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- podcast player for focused learning
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Steadcast is a native Swift/macOS application integrating complex low-level audio manipulation (DSP silence trimming with AVFoundation), on-device speech transcription, and macOS system floating UI.
What it would actually take: Building this requires advanced Swift/macOS systems programming. The stack uses AVFoundation and CoreAudio for real-time DSP/audio processing to detect and trim silence without clipping, alongside Apple's Speech framework and Apple Intelligence APIs. A developer needs deep expertise in macOS app lifecycle, native audio pipelines, and background process management.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Snipd
Concerns raised: Without retrieval practice and spaced repetition, users will forget podcast content, AI-external memory replacement eliminates necessary retrieval effort needed for learning
Feature requests: Spaced repetition system for reviewing highlights, Generation effect practice (quiz-style challenges before showing answers), Interleaved review mixing different topics/types, Desktop app support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 145 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #90 of 146 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 163 days after the earliest competitor.
- CastLoom Pro · hn · 2026-03-16 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- drea · hn · 2026-05-18 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Invader · hn · 2026-08-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Orate · hn · 2026-07-21 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- podcast-deep-dive · github · 2026-09-23 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- I built RSS feeds for podcast guests, not podcasts · hn · 2026-02-09 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Podeo.ai · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Free, open-source native macOS client for di.fm · hn · 2026-02-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.