macOS 26 · Apple silicon Free 7-day trial · $29.99 to keep

Tapefolio

Tapefolio transcribes interview and meeting recordings on your Mac, labels the speakers, helps you replace names and other identifiers, and reads scanned pages and photos into searchable text. Your files are not uploaded.

Try it free for 7 days

The trial is the complete app for seven days from the first time you open it, with no account and nothing to enter. Buying is a single $29.99 payment, with every update included. You get a license key by email and on the page after you pay; paste it into the same app and it stays unlocked, with no second download. One key works on two of your Macs. Not useful? Email ben@purplelink.llc within 14 days of purchase (terms). Version 1.0.0, released October 9, 2026. 43 MB disk image. Needs macOS 26 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon.

Also in the Mac Suite: ModernTex, Outbound Veil, Legroom, Keyfeel, Tapefolio and Vitae Plus for life, $54.99 once.

Tapefolio's review window on an interview transcript. The left panel lists two speakers with their share of the words and seven identifiers found, none reviewed yet. The transcript fills the right, with names, a street and a first name underlined, and an audio player along the bottom. — The review screen on a demo recording: an invented interview read by two computer voices. The draft is not perfect, and the first pass did not mark every identifier.

Forty-five seconds in the app

The review screen on a demo interview, replacing or keeping each identifier, the export sheet, Batch OCR and the model settings. The footage is the running app. The interview is invented and read by computer voices.

Play the video on YouTube

How it works

You add a recording

Open audio files, or record from the microphone inside the app. Tapefolio transcribes on your Mac and keeps the time of every word.

You check it against the audio

The review screen plays the recording beside the text and highlights the word being spoken. You correct words, name the speakers and merge two labels that are one person.

You decide what is replaced

Identifier removal marks what it found. You replace or keep each one, or replace everything left, and then export. The key that maps the codes back is saved in a separate file.

What it looks like

Captures of the running app. The recording in the first four is an invented interview read by two computer voices, and the letters in the OCR capture are generated test files, so every name and number is made up. The draft has transcription errors, and the first pass missed some identifiers.

The review window before any decisions. Speakers are named Speaker 1 and Speaker 2, with 46% and 54% of the words. Seven identifiers are listed on the left with their times and codes, and the progress line reads 0 to replace, 0 left in, 7 not reviewed. — The review screen before any decisions. Seven identifiers are found and none is reviewed. The draft has errors: the clinic line reads “Brightwater Clinic Indecator”, and in this first pass the app did not mark “Decatur” (transcribed there as “Indecator”) or “Brightwater Clinic” as identifiers.

The same window after decisions. The speakers are renamed Interviewer and Participant. Five identifiers have a filled check mark, Elena is struck through and marked left in, and the progress line reads 5 to replace, 1 left in, 1 not reviewed. A Check these too list at the bottom offers Brightwater and Clinic. — After deciding case by case: five identifiers to replace, one left in (Elena) and one not yet reviewed. The speakers have been renamed. A “Check these too” list at the bottom of the panel offers more words, here “Brightwater” and “Clinic”, that you can remove as an identifier type. Anything you do not review is replaced when you export.

The transcript with the replacements shown. The text reads Dr. [PERSON 1], [PERSON 2], [ADDRESS 1], [PHONE 1], [EMAIL 1] and [PERSON 3] in place of the names, street, phone number and email address. Elena and the words Brightwater Clinic Indecator are still readable. — The preview with codes in place of the identifiers marked to replace. Elena was kept, and “Brightwater Clinic Indecator” is still readable because it was never marked. Detection misses some identifiers, so you read the result.

The Export sheet over the review window. Rows for Format (Web page, HTML), Look (Paper, light, serif), Title, Show timestamps, Add the draft notice at the top, Use MAXQDA time markers and Replace identifiers with codes. A note says 5 replaced, 1 left in, 1 not yet reviewed, and that the key that undoes the replacement is saved next to the export. — The export sheet. It offers a format and a look, timestamps, a draft notice, MAXQDA time markers and replacing identifiers with codes. It states how many were replaced, left in and not yet reviewed, and that the key that undoes the replacement is saved next to the export, to be kept apart from it.

The Batch OCR window. A left panel sets the workflow, what to read, how to read it and which outputs to make. In the middle a list of nine files shows each file's page count and confidence, with 97% for the receipt and 100% for the others. A page image and the recognized lines of a letter sit on the right. — Batch OCR on nine generated test files, 11 pages. The panel on the left sets the outputs, the list shows each file's confidence (97% for the receipt, 100% for the rest), and the recognized lines of the selected letter are on the right. The names and numbers in the letter are invented.

Settings, Models. Speech to text is set to Apple, built into macOS, many languages, and speaker separation to Standard. Under Models on this Mac, Whisper base English offers a 150 MB download, and NVIDIA Parakeet English and Whisper large v3 turbo are installed with a Delete button each. — Settings, Models. Speech to text is Apple’s recognition until you choose another. Whisper base is a 150 MB download here, and Parakeet and Whisper large v3 turbo are installed on this Mac, each with a Delete button.

What it does

Transcription	Transcribes audio on your Mac, with word timing. Until you download a speech model it uses Apple's on-device speech recognition, and macOS may fetch Apple's own model once the first time. Better models are optional downloads in Settings, from Hugging Face, each once: NVIDIA Parakeet for English, Whisper base for English and Whisper large-v3 turbo for many languages. Settings can delete any of them.
Speakers	Labels who is speaking, using the standard speaker-separation models that come with the app. In the review screen you name each speaker once and merge labels that belong to one person. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization is an optional download that separates speakers a second way.
Speaker memory	Optional, and opt-in for each project. Tapefolio requires a recorded consent note before it saves a voice. Voices are stored encrypted on your Mac, the app only suggests matches for you to confirm, and you can delete them.
Identifier removal	Finds names, places, organizations, emails, phone numbers, addresses, links, ID numbers and dates of birth, and replaces them with consistent codes. You review case by case: replace or keep each one, or replace all that remain. The key file that maps the codes back is kept separately. It misses some, so you read the result.
Review screen	An audio player next to the transcript, with the current word highlighted. Turns are editable, and you can rename or merge speakers and go through the identifier review without leaving the screen.
Export	Word, HTML, Markdown, plain text, SRT, VTT and JSON, and a timestamped Word file made to import into MAXQDA.
Recording	Record from the microphone in the app, then transcribe straight into the review screen.
Batch OCR	Reads photos, scans and PDFs, one file or a whole folder, and keeps two-column pages in reading order. Output is a searchable PDF with an invisible text layer, or text, Markdown, Word, JSON or CSV. You can save a workflow and run it again, and replace identifiers in the text with a separate key file. Each run writes a provenance record with a SHA-256 for every input file.

What it will not do

Get every word right	It will mishear words and mislabel speakers. Overlapping voices, quiet speech and short replies such as okay and yep are where it loses the most. Check any text you plan to quote against the recording.
Anonymize a transcript	Identifier removal finds many identifiers and misses some, and it cannot tell when a detail identifies someone only in context. It does not make a study compliant; that is for you and your ethics board. Read every transcript before you share it.
Read handwriting or phone photos reliably	OCR has been measured only on generated test files. Real handwriting and real phone photos of pages have not been tested.
Promise results in other languages	What has been measured is English meeting audio. Other languages, accents and a quiet two-person interview have not been measured, and Whisper is the model to try for languages other than English.
Run on an Intel Mac or an older macOS	It needs macOS 26 or later and Apple silicon. There is no Windows, iPhone or iPad version.
Send your files anywhere	There is no cloud transcription and there are no accounts. Nothing you open in Tapefolio is uploaded.

How well it works

These are small checks, run on an M4 MacBook with 16 GB, and your recordings will differ. Treat every transcript as a draft.

Words wrong	Two meetings from the AMI Meeting Corpus, four people each, headset mix. The word error rate was between 21% and 29% for Apple's engine, Parakeet and Whisper large-v3 turbo, and between 29% and 39% for Whisper base, the small optional download. Fillers are left out of the count, and many of the errors are dropped short replies and spelling conventions such as gonna and going.
Right speaker	On the same two meetings, between 87% and 94% of words were given to the right speaker. The speaker setting was tuned on those same two meetings, so a new recording may do worse.
Names found	Against the corpus's human labels on those meetings, identifier removal found 13 of 15 personal names and 2 of 2 places, and flagged one false place. That is a very small sample.
Scanned text	On 9 generated test files (11 pages), the OCR word error rate was 1.5%.

Privacy and what downloads

Your files stay on your Mac

Transcription, speaker labels, identifier removal and OCR run on your Mac. There are no accounts. If your ethics board requires that recordings stay on your own computer, Tapefolio does its work there; whether that meets the board's rules is for you and the board to decide.

Downloads, each once

The internet is used for three things, and none of them carries your files. The optional model downloads inside the app come from Hugging Face, once each. The app's check for a new version sends the app's name, its version, the macOS version and the app's update token to purplelink.llc. And macOS itself may download Apple's own speech model once if you use Apple's speech recognition. There is no analytics and no account. Details are on the privacy page.

Voices are opt-in

Speaker memory is off until you turn it on for a project and record a consent note. What it saves is stored encrypted on your Mac, and you can delete it.

Models
Model	For	Size
Apple's speech recognition	Transcription, used until you download a model	None from Tapefolio; macOS may fetch Apple's model once
NVIDIA Parakeet	English transcription	About 470 MB
Whisper base	English transcription, a small download	About 150 MB
Whisper large-v3 turbo	Transcription in many languages	About 650 MB
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization	Separating speakers	About 190 MB

Optional models can be deleted from Settings. The first time each model runs on a Mac, it can take a few minutes while macOS prepares the model for the Neural Engine, and Whisper large-v3 turbo can take about ten minutes the first time it runs on a given chip.

Credits: the speech models are NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 (CC BY 4.0), run through FluidAudio and FluidInference (Apache-2.0), and OpenAI Whisper (MIT), run through WhisperKit (MIT, Argmax). The speaker models are from pyannote and WeSpeaker, via FluidInference. The measurements above use the AMI Meeting Corpus (CC BY 4.0).

Price and trial

Seven days free

The trial is the complete app, counted from the first time you open it. No account and nothing to enter.

$29.99, once

One payment in US dollars, through Stripe. After the trial the app asks for a license key, which arrives in the receipt email and on the page after you pay. Every update is included.

One key, two Macs

The key unlocks Tapefolio on up to two of your own Macs, works offline and needs no second download. Refunds within 14 days: email ben@purplelink.llc.

System requirements

macOS	26 or later.
Mac	Apple silicon. There is no Intel version.
Disk space	The app is about 40 MB, plus the optional models you choose to download (see the sizes above).
Permissions	macOS asks for microphone access the first time you record in the app.

Frequently asked questions

What does it need to run?

macOS 26 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon. There is no Intel version.

Do my recordings leave my Mac?

No. Transcription, speaker labels, identifier removal and OCR all run on the Mac, and nothing from your files is sent anywhere. The internet is used for three things: the optional model downloads inside the app, which come from Hugging Face and happen once each; the app's check for a new version, which sends the app's name, its version, the macOS version and the app's update token to purplelink.llc; and macOS itself, which may download Apple's own speech model once if you use Apple's speech recognition. There is no analytics and no account.

How accurate is it?

It will mishear words and mislabel speakers. On two meeting recordings from the AMI corpus the word error rate was between 21% and 29% for Apple's speech recognition, Parakeet and Whisper large-v3 turbo, and between 29% and 39% for the small Whisper base model, so a person should check any text that will be quoted against the recording. The measured results are above.

Does it anonymize a transcript?

No. Identifier removal finds many identifiers and replaces them with codes, and it misses some. You review each one, and you should read the result before you share it. It does not make a study compliant; that is for you and your ethics board to decide.

What happens to the key file?

When Tapefolio replaces an identifier it writes a separate key file that maps each code back to the original. Anyone who has both the transcript and the key file can reverse the replacement, so store the key file somewhere other than where you share the transcript.

Does it remember people's voices?

Only if you turn speaker memory on for a project, and the app asks for a recorded consent note first. Voices are stored encrypted on your Mac, Tapefolio only suggests matches for you to confirm, and you can delete them. It has been tested only on recordings made the same day with the same microphone, so treat a suggestion as a suggestion.

Which speech model should I use?

Start with the default, Apple's on-device speech recognition, which needs no download from Tapefolio. On the two meetings measured, Apple's engine, Parakeet and Whisper large-v3 turbo were within about two points of each other, so none is proven better. Whisper base made more errors in the same tests. Parakeet was the fastest and is English only; Whisper large-v3 turbo covers many languages but was the slowest.

Why is the first run slow?

macOS prepares a speech model for the Neural Engine the first time that model runs on a Mac. That can take a few minutes for each model, and it happens once for each. Later runs of the same model start at once.

Does one license work on more than one Mac?

One license key works on two of your Macs. Paste the same key into Tapefolio on each one.

Are updates included?

Yes, all of them. The price is a single payment. Tapefolio checks for a new version and offers to install it in place.

What happens when the trial ends?

The trial is the complete app for seven days from the first time you open it, with no account. To keep using Tapefolio after that, buy it. You get a license key by email and on the page after you pay; choose Enter License Key in Tapefolio and paste it. It works offline and needs no second download.

Can I get a refund?

Email ben@purplelink.llc within 14 days of purchase. See the terms.

How do I get help?

Email ben@purplelink.llc. If you lose your download link, the Find a purchase page emails it again to the address you paid with.

Try it on one recording.

Seven days of the complete app, no account and nothing to enter. Then decide whether to keep it.

Try it free for 7 days Buy Tapefolio

macOS 26 or later · Apple silicon