$ cat ~/work/depoaudio.md
DepoAudio
Free the record from proprietary court-audio formats.
$ cat ~/depoaudio/problem.md
The problem
Court recordings come off the recording systems in proprietary container formats — SGMCA, FTR, BWF — that most audio tools can't open. The audio is right there, but it's locked behind a format you didn't choose and can't always read on your own machine.
The usual workarounds are worse than the problem: upload sensitive deposition audio to some converter website, pay for a bloated suite, or chase down the one piece of vendor software that happens to read the format. For a record that has to stay private and verbatim, none of that is acceptable.
$ cat ~/depoaudio/solution.md
What I built
DepoAudio is a small, fast desktop app that converts those proprietary formats to standard audio — WAV, MP3, FLAC, Opus — entirely on your machine. No subscriptions, no accounts, nothing uploaded anywhere.
It's more than a converter. Files come in organized into a library by case and participant, so the audio that backs a transcript stays findable months later instead of becoming another untitled blob in a downloads folder.
$ cat ~/depoaudio/on-device.md
Why on-device matters
Legal audio is some of the most sensitive material there is — it's the record. The instinct of most modern software is to send it to a server to process. DepoAudio's whole stance is the opposite: the audio never leaves the machine it's on. That's not a feature toggle, it's the architecture.
It also means no per-seat pricing, no usage limits, and nothing to break when a vendor changes their terms. The professionals who produce the record shouldn't have to rent access to their own files.
$ cat ~/depoaudio/build.md
How it's built
It's a Tauri app — a Rust core with a React front end — which keeps the binary small and the conversion fast while staying cross-platform across Windows and macOS. FFmpeg does the heavy lifting on the decode/encode side, wrapped so the messy format details never reach the user.
The hard part wasn't the UI; it was the formats. Reliably reading the proprietary containers and mapping them onto clean, standard output — without losing a sample of the record — is where the real work went.
$ cat ~/depoaudio/open-source.md
Open source, on purpose
I open-sourced DepoAudio because tooling for the legal record shouldn't be a black box. If it touches the record, you should be able to see exactly what it does to it. The source is public, and the app is free.
It's the first thing shipped under DepoStack — the proof that vendor-neutral, on-device, pro-first software for this field is something I'll actually build, not just talk about.