Echo is a native macOS menu-bar app that remembers every piece of audio and video you play - across native apps and in the browser - and lets you jump back to any of it with a single keystroke. For researchers and journalists, the two features that matter most are Moments and the searchable history.
Why Do Researchers and Journalists Lose Sources?
The problem is almost always the same: you hear something useful mid-interview, mid-lecture, or mid-conference recording, you mean to go back, and by the time you do the tab is closed or the file is buried. Standard browser history tells you which page you visited but not where in the video the relevant passage was. YouTube Watch History records that you watched something but not that you paused at 42 minutes and 17 seconds because a source named a document you needed.
Echo solves both problems at once.
What Is a Moment and How Does It Help?
A Moment is a saved timestamp - the exact second you were at when something mattered. While anything is playing, you can drop a Moment bookmark on it. Later, that Moment appears in your history with the source, the timestamp, and your note if you added one. One click takes you back to the precise point in the recording.
For a journalist transcribing an interview, this replaces the old habit of scribbling a counter number on a notepad. For a researcher working through a three-hour conference recording, it means you can mark four or five relevant passages during a first pass and return to each one later without scrubbing through the entire file again.
During an initial listen, drop a Moment every time a source says something quotable or cites a fact you need. Transcribe or verify only those flagged passages rather than the full recording.
How Does Echo Capture Browser Sources?
Much research today happens in a browser - YouTube documentary footage, archived conference talks, Vimeo interviews, audio hosted on news sites. Echo captures all of it alongside native app playback, so your history is unified. You do not need separate notes for 'things I watched in the browser' and 'things I played in a media app.' Everything appears in the same searchable list.
The history is stored entirely on your Mac. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no account to create, and the data never leaves your machine.
Finding a Source You Played Weeks Ago
The searchable history is the second half of the research workflow. Once something has played on your Mac, Echo has a record of it: the title, the source, and when you played it. If you remember hearing a particular name or phrase but cannot recall which interview it came from, you can search your history and find it.
This is meaningfully different from relying on browser history, which only records page visits, or from trying to reconstruct a media trail from memory. Echo maintains the trail automatically.
You can also resume any source at the exact point you left off. Press ⌘⇧E to open Echo from anywhere on your Mac and pick up where you stopped - useful when an interview runs long and you need to step away mid-listen.
Why On-Device Privacy Matters for This Work
Journalists working with sensitive sources and researchers handling unpublished data have good reason to be cautious about where their notes and media trails end up. Cloud-synced history logs are a liability when the sources you are researching are confidential.
Echo keeps everything on your Mac. There is no account, no sync, and no cloud component. Your listening history is yours alone.
Because Echo never transmits your history off-device, you can use it to track interviews and recordings that touch on confidential material without creating an external log of what you have been listening to.
The Shelf: Keeping Active Sources Accessible
The Shelf is a lightweight holding area for things you are actively working through. Pin an interview to the Shelf while you are mid-research and it stays in reach from the menu bar, separate from the full history. When you are done with a source, remove it. It remains in history regardless.
What Echo Captures
Echo works across native macOS media apps and the browser. If audio or video is playing on your Mac, Echo is recording the session. You do not need to do anything to enable capture - it is automatic from the moment the app is running.
- Native macOS audio and video apps
- Browser video and audio (YouTube, Vimeo, hosted audio, and similar)
- Podcasts played through native apps
- Anything that produces media output on your Mac
What Does Echo Cost?
Echo is a one-time purchase at $9.99. It works on up to three Macs and includes all future updates. There is no subscription and no recurring charge.
Frequently asked
Can I add a note when I save a Moment?
Does Echo record audio from my microphone or capture my own voice?
What happens to my history if I uninstall Echo?
Can I use Echo across multiple Macs - for example a home machine and a work machine?
Echo - Your Media Memory for Mac
One-time $9.99, works on three Macs, and every source you play is private and searchable from the moment you install it.
One-time purchase, yours forever.