Why I Open-Sourced DepoAudio (and What Free Tools Do for Court Reporting)
The story behind giving the court-audio converter away — why some legal-tech plumbing should just be free, and what that does for trust in a vendor-locked field.
I gave DepoAudio away. Free, open source, no account, no upsell. People in legal tech ask why — usually with the slight suspicion that there’s a catch. There isn’t. There’s a reason, and it’s worth saying out loud.
Some plumbing should just be plumbing
DepoAudio does one unglamorous thing: it gets court recordings out of proprietary formats and into standard audio, on your machine. That’s not a product so much as a fix for a problem that shouldn’t exist — a problem created entirely by vendors deciding your own recordings should be hard to open without their software.
Charging for the antidote to artificial lock-in would make me part of the thing I’m trying to fix. So I didn’t.
What open source changes
- No account is required. A user can download the app without creating another identity or subscription.
- The code is inspectable. An IT team can review what the app does before it touches a recording.
- The installed app is not metered by a per-file service. Conversion runs on the machine, using the files already there.
The bet
DepoAudio is the shipped part of DepoStack: free, open source, and on-device. Open the DepoAudio case study for its current capabilities and limits.
The professionals who produce the legal record have been treated as a market to lock in. I’d rather treat them as the people the whole system depends on. The free tool is just the most honest way to start.
The original build note has the technical side of that decision.