$ cat ~/blog/open-court-recording-formats.md
How to Open SGMCA, FTR & BWF Court Recordings Without the Vendor's Software
A plain-English guide to the proprietary audio formats court recordings ship in — and how to convert them to standard audio on your own machine, for free.
If you work anywhere near litigation, you’ve lived this: someone hands you a disc — yes, a disc — of courtroom audio, and the files won’t open in anything you own. .sgmca. FTR. A multi-channel .bwf with a sidecar you’re apparently supposed to know about. The hearing happened, the record exists, and you still can’t listen to it without hunting down a proprietary player from a vendor who’d really like to sell your firm a license.
Here’s the plain-English version of what these formats are and how to get out of jail.
What you’re actually looking at
- FTR (
.trm/.ftr) — For The Record’s container, common in courtrooms. Often multi-channel (one channel per microphone) so you can isolate the judge, the witness, counsel. - BWF (
.bwf) — Broadcast Wave. Technically a standard WAV with extra metadata, but multi-channel BWF trips up consumer players, and the channels matter. - SGMCA / other proprietary wrappers — vendor containers that bundle audio + timestamps + annotations. The audio is in there; it’s just wrapped.
None of this is exotic codec wizardry. In almost every case the underlying audio is ordinary PCM — it’s the container and the channel layout that lock you out, not the sound itself.
Getting to standard audio
The goal is simple: a normal .wav or .mp3 (or per-channel files) you can play, clip, and load into anything.
- Keep the original. Never convert in place. The original is the record; you’re making a working copy.
- Split the channels if it’s multi-channel. A four-mic FTR file becomes far more useful as four mono tracks you can solo.
- Convert the container, not the content. You’re re-wrapping PCM into a standard format, which means no quality loss.
- Stay on-device. This is testimony. It should never have to be uploaded to a web service just to be playable.
This is exactly the itch I built DepoAudio to scratch — it converts SGMCA, FTR, and BWF to standard formats entirely on your machine, free and open source, with the channels handled for you. Some plumbing should just be plumbing.
Have a format that won’t open that I didn’t list here? Tell me — I keep a running list, and the converter’s whole point is that the record shouldn’t be held hostage by the software that made it.