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Audio field journal

A fully local ingestion pipeline for field recordings — nothing leaves the machine

Case study. This system is private — its architecture is described here, but it is not linked and no real data or media from it appears.

Drop a recorder's files into an inbox and the pipeline takes over: wait for the file to stop growing, extract and flatten the mid channel from mid/side, diarize, transcribe with word-level timestamps, merge speakers, and archive the result with acoustic bookmarks intact.

Enrichment and chat run against a local model over Metal. The design rule is absolute and shapes everything else — no audio, no transcript, and no derived text ever leaves the machine, which rules out every hosted transcription service and is the reason the pipeline exists at all.

Stack

  • Python
  • faster-whisper
  • pyannote
  • Ollama + Qwen
  • Metal