Search your interview recordings and verify every quote

Two problems: finding and verifying

On deadline, you need the line a source said forty minutes into a ninety-minute interview. Weeks later, an editor or a lawyer asks you to show exactly where it was said and in what context. Notes help with the first. Only the recording settles the second.

Across a long investigation, the harder question is often “has anyone else mentioned this company?” That is a search across every recording you have, not a scan of one.

What reporters use now, and the catch

For stories involving whistleblowers, minors or anyone at risk, where the recording goes is not a detail. Many newsrooms have guidance on this; follow yours.

• Handwritten or typed notes with rough times. Fast in the moment, and incomplete by nature.
• Cloud transcription apps. Convenient and accurate, but the audio of a confidential source now lives on a vendor's servers, under that vendor's retention policy and whatever legal process can reach it.
• Running Whisper yourself. Private, but you end up with a folder of text files, a search in your editor, and a lot of scrubbing to match text back to audio.

A local workflow for interviews

Ask, the on-device assistant, can answer questions like “which sources mentioned the contract renewal?” and cites each file and timestamp it used. Treat that as a pointer to the recordings, not as a replacement for listening.

1. Keep interviews in a folder MediaFind watches. It checks about once a minute while the app is open and indexes new recordings once they finish copying.
2. Add names to the names and terms list so sources, officials and organizations are spelled right in the transcript.
3. Search by meaning, like “when he explains why the audit was delayed,” or look for every mention of a person or organization across all your recordings.
4. Click a result to play from that second. Listen to the full context before you use the quote.
5. Export the transcript as Word, PDF or text for your notes or your editor.

Documents and screenshots too

Photos are indexed next to audio and video, including the text inside them. A phone photo of a document, a screenshot of a post, or a slide from a briefing becomes searchable by the words in it. Press conferences you recorded on video are searchable by what was said and by on-screen text such as captions or slides.

Keeping a long investigation organized

Give each story or beat its own folder, so a search can stay focused on one investigation. Free tags and categories let you mark recordings by source type or status, and saved searches keep recurring queries, like a company or an official's name, ready to rerun as new interviews come in. With Pro, collections group recordings into nested folders of your own without moving the files on disk.

When the project moves to a new drive, relink the library instead of reindexing. You can also export the library as a portable ZIP to continue on another computer, while the original recordings stay where they are.

Source protection by default

MediaFind transcribes, indexes and answers on your computer. There is no account, no upload, and no prompt sent to a server. After the one-time model download it works offline, and a built-in privacy check lets you confirm zero external connections on the core path. If you connect a cloud AI assistant over MCP, the results it asks for go to that assistant, so leave that off for sensitive work.

Machine transcripts make mistakes, especially with names, accents and crosstalk. Always check a quote against the audio before publishing.

Frequently asked questions

Can I transcribe and search interviews without uploading them?

Yes. MediaFind runs transcription and search on your own computer. After the models download once, it works with the network off.

How do I prove where a quote came from?

Every search result links to the file and the exact timestamp. Play it from there to hear the quote in context, and keep the transcript export alongside your notes.

Can I find every time a person or company was mentioned?

Yes. People, places and organizations are picked out of every transcript, so you can find each time a name came up across all your recordings.

Is the transcript accurate enough to quote directly?

It is a strong starting point, but machine transcription can mishear names and overlapping speech. Verify every quote against the recording before publishing.