transcribe_podcastLABSCO SUMMARY
The whole clipping pipeline, on your machine, drivable by an agent.
It is the rare tool where the agent surface is not an afterthought: transcription through to publishing is exposed as tools, and the knowledge base means the titles and picks come out in your show's voice rather than a generic one.
What it is
A local podcast clipper with three front ends: a CLI, a web studio, and an MCP server so a coding agent can do the whole thing through conversation. One command transcribes the episode, picks the moments worth clipping, crops to whoever is speaking, and burns the captions in — transcription and rendering happen on your machine.
What you get
- 26 MCP tools by the README's count, enough for an agent to run transcription, scoring, rendering and publishing end to end
- Clips in 9:16, 16:9 or 1:1 with captions sized per canvas, face tracking that follows the speaker, split-screen layouts, and multi-segment cuts that drop filler and long pauses
- Four caption styles — branded, hormozi, karaoke, subtle — plus logos, intros, outros and background music from a reusable asset library, managed through
manage_assets - Finding the moments: Whisper transcription with speaker diarization, or your own
.txt,.srtor.vtt; AssemblyAI as an alternative engine; yt-dlp to pull an episode from a URL; audio energy and laughter detection for highlight reels - A knowledge base that teaches it your show's voice and title formulas, and checks suggestions against your episode database so it stops resuggesting moments you already published — edited in the studio or through
knowledge_base - The studio at
localhost:3847— library, episode workspace, per-clip detail, highlights, thumbnails, content, analytics, assets, knowledge and config, with a command palette across pages, clips and assets - Shipping — YouTube publishing with performance analytics, DaVinci Resolve export as FCPXML, presets, clip history with duplicate detection, and
manage_configfor the config profile
Requirements
No prerequisites to install: the shell or PowerShell installer fetches a self-contained binary, and the first run provisions Python, Node, FFmpeg, whisper.cpp and the models into a managed folder. Runs on macOS Apple Silicon, Linux x64 and arm64, and Windows x64. Clips land in podcli-clips/ beside where you ran it unless PODCLI_OUTPUT says otherwise. Two settings matter for the agent path: podcli mcp install registers it with Claude Code, and PODCLI_PORT must be set in the MCP client's environment too, or the MCP tools render without live studio progress. Speaker diarization needs a Hugging Face token in HF_TOKEN. The only outbound calls are the optional AssemblyAI engine, YouTube publishing, and the optional AI clip scoring. AGPL-3.0, with a commercial licence available.
Setup effort
One command — curl -fsSL https://podcli.com/install.sh | sh
USE CASES
Getting shorts out of an episode you just recorded
One command transcribes it, picks the moments, crops to the speaker and burns in captions — the clips land in a folder beside the episode.
Running the whole thing from your coding agent
Register the MCP server and ask for transcription, scoring and rendering in conversation rather than at the command line.
Keeping the titles in your show's voice
Point the knowledge base at your voice rules and title formulas so generated copy sounds like the show, not like a template.
Not republishing a moment you already used
Suggestions are checked against your episode database, so previously published clips stop coming back.
Finishing an edit by hand
Export any clip as FCPXML and take it into DaVinci Resolve when the automatic cut is not enough.
Using a transcript you already have
Bring your own text, subtitle or caption file instead of transcribing again — a previously transcribed video reuses its cached face map, so speaker framing survives the swap.
26 tools
Listed in project code.
transcribe_startjob_statussuggest_clipscreate_clipbatch_create_clipsknowledge_basemanage_assetsclip_historyget_ui_statemodify_cliptoggle_clipupdate_settingslist_outputsmanage_presetsmanage_thumbnail_configanalyze_energymanage_reelset_videoimport_transcriptparse_transcriptmanage_integrationsexport_to_davinci_resolvemanage_configmanage_envai_cli_statusBEFORE YOU INSTALL
What to know first
Tools you get
26 tools registered in the project's code.
Requires
podcli on PATH
INSTALLATION
Connect your client
Server setup
curl -fsSL https://podcli.com/install.sh | shMCP Clients
Claude Code
podcli mcp install # registers it with Claude Code