DepoAudio: getting court audio out of jail

If you work anywhere near litigation, you’ve lived this one: someone hands you a disc — yes, a disc — of courtroom audio, and ordinary media software does not give you a dependable complete session. .sgmca. FTR/TRM blocks. Multi-channel BWF with a sidecar you’re apparently supposed to know about. The hearing happened, the record exists, and you may still need the originating player or a verified conversion path before you can use it.

I work at a court reporting firm. We produce the record. Watching the record get held hostage by file formats finally annoyed me enough to do something about it.

September 4, 2026 correction: this June introduction overstated Merge availability, installer signing, macOS support, and the app’s network boundary. The details below now follow the published v1.0.2 release record, rather than unreleased source or intended behavior.

the rules I set

Court audio can contain confidential or otherwise sensitive material, so I set three constraints:

• Recording processing happens on your machine. Core conversion and cleanup run locally. The reviewed v1.0.2 app has no recording-upload path; optional model installation downloads assets from GitHub without sending the recording. Your own backup and sharing settings still matter. The privacy details spell out that boundary.
• No accounts. You shouldn’t have to create a login to listen to a hearing you were at.
• Free and open source. This is plumbing. I do not want an account or subscription between a reporter and the recording.

what it does

DepoAudio converts supported SGMCA, BWF, and standard media into formats the rest of the world actually plays — WAV, MP3, FLAC, Opus. FTR/TRM handling is experimental because delivered variants differ, so detection is a starting point and every result still needs verification. When a variant cannot be identified or verified cleanly, use FTR Player or the originating system’s approved export route. The app can also clean up recordings, and it keeps a local library organized by case and session instead of AUDIO_0047_FINAL(2).zip. Merge is not a supported workflow in v1.0.2.

the stack

Tauri 2 with a Rust backend and a React front end. Rust handles format detection, builds the FFmpeg filter chains, and persists the library; Tauri keeps the whole thing small and native instead of shipping a browser in a trench coat. The published v1.0.2 macOS build is ad-hoc signed and not notarized; its Windows EXE and MSI installers are not Authenticode signed.

why open source

Because “trust me” is not a security model you should accept from legal software. The whole thing is on GitHub — auditable, forkable, yours to keep. If your IT department wants to read every line before it touches a deposition, they can. Honestly, they should.

The v1.0.2 release targets Windows 10 or 11 on x64 and macOS 13.3 or later, with a universal Mac build. Check the install guide for platform details. If there’s a format you’re stuck with that it doesn’t handle yet, the repo takes format requests — that’s half the roadmap.

If you’re deciding what kind of recording you received before converting it, start with the plain-English court-recording format guide.

— Andrew