Journalists and reporters
Audio transcription software for Mac that leaves no vendor holding your interview recording
Ghosty Notes records and transcribes on your own machine, so the file of your source talking is not sitting in a company's account waiting to be asked for.
Ghosty Notes runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon, because transcription happens on the device; Intel Macs are not supported.
no notetaker in this list
what the other side sees while you record
Every cloud transcription service creates the same thing for a reporter, and it is rarely the thing in the marketing copy. It creates a custodian. Somebody other than you now holds a copy of a source interview, and that somebody can be served with legal process, can be breached, and can have a policy on notifying you that is not the policy you would have chosen.
Ghosty Notes works the other way around. It records the meeting or call through your Mac's own audio, so nothing joins as a participant and a nervous source does not see an unfamiliar name appear. Speech becomes text with a model running on the machine. The transcript and the summary are written as plain markdown files into a folder you pick, which you can encrypt, back up or delete on your own schedule.
It is also worth being clear about what this is and is not. It is built for live conversations, calls, interviews and briefings, and for searching what you recorded afterwards. If your job is mostly running existing audio files through a transcriber, there are good Mac tools for exactly that, and one of them is named further down this page.
Removing the third-party custodian, and what that does not give you
The legal ground under source protection in the United States is thinner than most people assume. There is no federal shield law. The PRESS Act, which would have created one, passed the House and then died in the Senate in December 2024. Most states have a shield statute, but a state statute may not apply in a federal-question proceeding, and what protection exists there varies: most federal appellate circuits recognise some qualified reporter's privilege, and its strength differs by court and by proceeding.
That is the context that makes storage location a working question rather than a philosophical one. When a transcription service holds your recording, there is a party in the chain who is not you and who has no journalistic stake in your story. They can receive legal process directed at them. Their obligations to tell you about it are theirs to define, not yours, and in some circumstances they may be barred from telling you at all. A vendor can also be breached, and a breach of a transcription vendor is a breach of every interview inside it. None of that requires anyone to act in bad faith. It only requires the copy to exist somewhere you do not control.
A file on your own disk removes that party. It does not make you safe, and we are not going to imply that it does. Your own device can be subpoenaed. It can be seized at a border, taken under a warrant, stolen, or compelled from you directly. The precise thing that changes is the removal of a silent custodian, someone who can be asked for your material without your knowledge and without your ability to challenge it. That is a real and narrow benefit and it is worth having. It is not immunity, and any tool that sells it to you as immunity is selling you something it cannot deliver.
Two things sit alongside that and neither is handled for you. Recording consent varies by jurisdiction: the federal floor is one-party consent, and roughly a dozen states require all parties to a conversation to consent. The count and the detail matter, so check your own state and the state your source is sitting in rather than relying on a rule of thumb, and note that we do not manage, prompt for or record consent anywhere in the product. Second, the file is only as protected as the disk it is on. Local storage with no full-disk encryption and no passphrase discipline is not a security posture, it is a folder.
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and reporting on the PRESS Act
- There is no federal shield law. The PRESS Act passed the House and died in the Senate in December 2024. State shield statutes may not apply in federal-question proceedings, and the qualified privilege federal courts recognise varies by circuit and by proceeding.
- Federal and state recording-consent law
- The federal floor is one-party consent, and roughly a dozen states require all parties to consent. Check the specific states involved.
How it fits reporting work
Choose the folder before the first interview
Set the notes directory to a location on an encrypted disk that you have thought about, not a default path. Everything lands there as plain markdown, which means it is searchable with the tools you already use and deletable when a story closes and you decide the material should not persist.
Get consent, then record the call
Ask for permission on the record, as the law where you and your source are sitting requires. Then start recording. Because audio comes from the Mac system output, no participant appears in Zoom, Meet or Teams, so a source who agreed to talk does not spend the first minute watching an unknown attendee join.
Work the transcript, not your memory
After the interview you have a transcript and a summary as text. Use the transcript to pull exact quotes and to check what was actually said before you attribute it. Speaker identification is a Pro feature and helps on a multi-voice briefing, but on a contested quote go back to the audio.
Search the whole beat later
The value on a running story is the second interview and the tenth. Search across everything you have recorded for a name, a date or a phrase, or point Claude or another MCP client at the local server so you can ask what a source said months ago without opening ten files.
What reporters ask before trusting it with an interview
- MacWhisper already does local transcription on a Mac. Why this?
- MacWhisper is a good tool, it is genuinely local, it is Mac-native and it sells a one-time licence, which suits file-based transcription very well. If you mostly drop existing recordings in and get text out, buy it. What we do differently is capture a live call as it happens, produce meeting-shaped notes with dates and participants, and give you a searchable history across everything you have recorded. Different job, not a better version of the same one.
- Does this actually protect my source?
- It removes one specific risk and leaves the rest. There is no vendor holding a copy that can be served without your knowledge. Your own machine can still be subpoenaed or seized, and there is no federal shield law behind you if the investigation is federal. Treat it as one part of your operational security, alongside disk encryption, and not as protection in itself.
- My editor wants the transcript. Is there a shared workspace?
- No. There is no team plan, no shared library and no admin view. The files are markdown, so you send the one you want to send, which is arguably the behaviour you want on a sensitive story. But if your newsroom needs everyone's interviews in one searchable place, this is not that product.
- How accurate is it on accents, crosstalk and bad phone audio?
- We publish no accuracy figures, because we have no measured data and any number would be made up. Phone audio, heavy crosstalk and strong accents are hard for every transcription tool including this one. Check every quote against the audio before you publish it, which is what you already do.
- I am on a newsroom Windows machine.
- Then it will not run. Ghosty Notes is macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon only, and Intel Macs are excluded too. Many reporters buy their own laptop for exactly this kind of reason, but we are not going to pretend the constraint is not real.
- Can I use it on a recording I already have?
- It is built to capture live audio through the Mac rather than to batch-process an archive of files. If your workload is a stack of existing recordings, a file-first transcriber is the better fit for that part of the job.
Against the transcription tools reporters actually use
| Ghosty Notes | Alternatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Where transcription happens | On your Mac, using a model on the device | Otter, Trint and Descript process on their servers; MacWhisper runs on your Mac |
| Third party holding your interview | None in local mode, the file stays on your disk | Yes for Otter, Trint and Descript; no for MacWhisper |
| Live call capture | Captures system audio with no participant in the call | Otter captures live calls, from its desktop app with nothing joining or with a notetaker in the meeting, and uploads either way; Trint, Descript and MacWhisper are file-first |
| Searchable history across interviews | Yes, across your local files, including from an AI client over MCP | Yes in Otter and Trint, inside their accounts |
| Editing audio or video | Not offered, this is notes and transcripts only | Descript is built for it |
| Pricing model | Free tier, or Pro at $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year | Subscription for Otter, Trint and Descript; one-time licence for MacWhisper |
| Platform | macOS on Apple Silicon only | Mac, Windows and web across Otter, Trint and Descript; MacWhisper is Mac |
Questions from reporters
- If I turn on Pro's hosted models, what leaves my Mac?
- The transcript text, for the feature you switched on, such as a hosted summary or fast cross-meeting chat. The audio never leaves the device on any tier. In local mode nothing is sent at all. On a sensitive story, stay in local mode.
- What hardware does it need?
- A Mac with Apple Silicon. Transcription runs on the device, so Intel Macs are not supported.
- Does it work with no internet connection?
- Yes, in local mode. The speech model is downloaded once and then runs on the machine, so recording and transcription work on a plane or in a building with no usable signal.
- Do I still need consent to record an interview?
- Yes, and the rules depend on where you and your source are. The federal floor is one-party consent and roughly a dozen states require everyone on the call to consent. The product does not prompt for, manage or store consent, so that stays your responsibility.
- Can I delete a recording completely?
- The notes are files in a folder you chose, so you delete them the way you delete any other file, and there is no vendor copy left behind in local mode. If deletion needs to be thorough, that is a matter of your disk and your backups, which is why it is worth deciding where the folder lives before the first interview.
- Does it identify who is speaking?
- Speaker identification is a Pro feature. It helps on a group briefing or a press call, and like every such feature it is better with clean audio. Verify a contested attribution against the recording rather than the labels.
- What is free and what costs money?
- Free covers on-device transcription, unlimited meetings, the local MCP server and local Apple Calendar detection. Pro at $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year adds cloud calendar sync for Google and Outlook, hosted AI models, fast cross-meeting chat, Obsidian sync and speaker identification.
- Is the interface available in other languages?
- No, the app interface is English. The transcript and the summary follow the language spoken in the interview.
Keep your interviews on your own disk
Free for unlimited local recording and on-device transcription, with no vendor account holding a copy of your source.
Download free for Mac