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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.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.