cast2md

Podcast transcription service -- download episodes via RSS and transcribe with Whisper. Automatically fetches publisher-provided transcripts (Podcasting 2.0) or Pocket Casts auto-generated transcripts before falling back to local transcription.

Note: This is a personal project under active development. I'm sharing it in case others find it useful, but I'm not currently providing support or reviewing pull requests.

Features

• Transcript-first workflow -- fetches external transcripts from Podcasting 2.0 tags and Pocket Casts before downloading audio
• Whisper transcription -- local transcription with faster-whisper or mlx-whisper (CPU, CUDA, Apple Silicon)
• Distributed transcription -- use remote machines (M4 Macs, GPU PCs) or RunPod GPU pods to transcribe in parallel
• Hybrid search -- full-text and semantic search across episode metadata and transcript content (pgvector)
• Web UI, CLI, REST API -- manage feeds, view episodes, search transcripts, monitor processing
• MCP server -- Claude integration via Model Context Protocol

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/meltforce/cast2md.git
cd cast2md
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env -- set POSTGRES_PASSWORD at minimum
docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:8000 to access the web UI.

Documentation

Full documentation is available at meltforce.org/cast2md.

License

MIT