Show HN: Libretto – Simple recording and editing, an alternative to Descript

libretto.fm

31 points by michael_y 18 days ago

Hi HN, We’re excited to share Libretto – a web-based recording and editing tool designed for creators, podcasters, and teams working remotely. If you’re familiar with Descript, you’ll find Libretto is similar but with unique features and a focus on simplicity.

What makes Libretto unique:

Local recording for high-quality audio/video: Libretto records media locally on each participant’s device and uploads it in the background, ensuring pristine quality even under poor network conditions. This works like double-ended recording but entirely within your browser.

Powerful yet simple editing tools: Transcript-based editing: Edit audio/video as if you’re editing text. Automatic filler word removal: Get rid of "uhs" and "ums" with one click. Core editing tools like splitting, trimming, and cropping are intuitive for non-professionals.

Collaborative and browser-based: No downloads required – everything runs in the browser. Teams can work together, sharing projects and edits in real time.

Built with:

LiveKit for webRTC infrastructure, Deepgram for transcriptions, Rendley’s video editing SDK and Liveblocks for real time shared state.

Libretto is free to try, and we’d love your feedback to make it better. If you’re curious, check it out. Questions, thoughts, or suggestions? We’re here to listen!

zamderax 17 days ago

A marketing rule is that you cannot pick the same combination of colors as the incumbent product. Because looking at your website, I am thinking of DeScript all the time. So your website is now an ad for DeScript. This is why Pepsi cannot pick red and Xbox cannot pick Blue.

Congrats but please change the color if you want to compare yourself to DeScript.

  • michael_y 17 days ago

    Thanks for this suggestion. We’ll keep it in mind as we refine our branding.

unstatusthequo 18 days ago

Neat alternative it seems. I do wish there was something like this that was on-device only. My guess is maybe there is, with some local LLM, but I’m just unaware of it.

  • xnx 18 days ago

    I wrote a very basic version of this for automatically removing ads from podcasts. It works exactly as I hoped, but needs a little work yet before sharing. Very basic combination of Whisper -> Gemini -> FFMPEG. Gemini is so good and so cheap (pennies) that I haven't prioritized using local models, but that should work too.

  • michael_y 18 days ago

    Thanks! I can see how on-device can be appealing, especially for the editor with a local model transcribing the media files to text.