Honest comparison

DepoAudio vs. the Alternatives — An Honest Look

Every court reporter hits the same wall eventually: the recording is right there, but it's locked inside a format only your CAT software can open. So you start Googling — "how to get audio out of my CAT software," "convert SGMCA to WAV," "play a .trm file." The tools that made those recordings are excellent at capturing and managing them, but getting a clean, standard file back out to a scopist, a client, or an editor was never really their job. That's the gap DepoAudio fills.

vs. Stenograph Audio Export

Stenograph's Case CATalyst is the backbone of countless reporting workflows, and its audio capture is tightly integrated with the rest of the CAT environment — exactly what you want while you're writing. The friction shows up afterward. CATalyst saves audio as SGMCA: standard Ogg Vorbis wrapped in a 96-byte proprietary header that stops ordinary players, editors, and transcription services from reading it. Exporting to a universally playable file isn't really what the audio tooling is built for, and CATalyst runs on Windows only, which leaves Mac-based reporters without an option at all. DepoAudio is purpose-built for that last step: it strips the header and converts SGMCA to WAV, MP3, FLAC, Opus, or M4A in seconds, on Windows or macOS, with no CATalyst license required. It doesn't replace CATalyst — it just opens what CATalyst made.

vs. FTR Manager

For The Record's FTR is a courtroom-recording standard, and FTR Manager does its job well inside the FTR ecosystem — capturing, logging, and playing back multi-channel proceedings. The difficulty is portability. FTR saves audio as .trm files holding AAC with a non-standard codec tag (0x4180) that off-the-shelf tools refuse to decode, the software is Windows-only, and it's commercially licensed. A freelance reporter or transcriptionist handed a folder of .trm segments may have no way to open them at all. As an FTR audio converter alternative, DepoAudio reads the .trm codec directly, batch-converts a whole session's segments in order, and exports clean WAV or MP3 on any machine, free. It isn't trying to be a courtroom recording system — it's the bridge that gets FTR audio out to everyone downstream who doesn't have FTR installed.

vs. DIY ffmpeg

ffmpeg is extraordinary, and if you're comfortable on the command line it can convert almost anything — including, with enough effort, court recording formats. The catch is the effort. ffmpeg won't open an SGMCA file because of the 96-byte header, and it won't decode FTR's 0x4180 codec tag without manual coaxing; the workarounds involve hex-editing headers, custom codec flags, and batch scripts, where one wrong parameter silently corrupts the output. It also assumes a comfort with the terminal that most reporters reasonably don't have, and it does nothing to organize the results. DepoAudio is essentially that ffmpeg pipeline — ffmpeg is bundled inside — with the court-format knowledge built in and the command line removed. Drop the file, pick a format, click Convert, and the result lands organized by case. Same engine, none of the archaeology.

We're not here because those tools are bad — we're here because they're built for different things. DepoAudio's only job is getting your audio out, clean, organized, and into a format the rest of the world can open.

Stenograph, Case CATalyst, For The Record, and FTR are trademarks of their respective owners. DepoAudio is an independent, open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by these companies. These comparisons describe the gap DepoAudio is built to fill — not a criticism of tools designed for different purposes.