Clip client podcasts without uploading them

Checked against v1.1.5, 12 September 2026.

tondi cuts short captioned clips from a podcast episode on your own Mac. The recording never leaves the machine, so unreleased episodes, interviews under embargo and anything a client hasn't cleared for a third party can be clipped without asking anyone's permission to upload it — and without a per-minute bill for a two-hour show.

Why does “no upload” matter for client work?

Because the alternative is a conversation. A cloud clipper means the client's raw episode sits on someone else's server while you work, under that company's terms, for as long as their retention policy says. For a lot of editors that is a clause in a contract, an NDA question, or simply a thing you would rather not have to explain. With tondi there is nothing to explain: transcription, choosing the moments and rendering all happen on your Mac, and the privacy policy lists every connection the app makes — none of them carries your video, audio or transcript.

The second reason is arithmetic. Cloud clippers bill per minute of source footage, and a podcast is long. tondi is $10 a month, flat — a weekly two-hour show is the same price as a monthly ten-minute one.

How long does an episode take?

On an M3 MacBook Air with 16 GB, a 58-minute 1080p episode took 6 minutes 25 seconds at the Standard tier — from dropping the file to five finished 9:16 clips — measured on 12 September 2026. Transcription is most of it; the five clips rendered in under a minute. Longer episodes scale roughly in proportion, and the Best accuracy tier takes several times longer than Standard.

That is slower than a cloud service's headline number and faster than uploading a 2 GB file on most connections. It also runs in the background: drop the episode, edit something else, come back.

What the workflow looks like

1. Drop the episode in. .mp4 or .mov from your editor or recorder. The video track is required — an audio-only .mp3 won't open.
2. Pick the shapes and the captions. Vertical 9:16, Square 1:1, Portrait 4:5, Horizontal 16:9 — several in one run. Six caption fonts, your colours. Choose how many clips and how long.
3. Get files in a folder. Every clip is an H.264 .mp4, named by shape, saved where you told it — a client folder, a shared drive, wherever. A transcript.json sits beside them so a second run on the same episode skips transcription.
4. Review and keep what works. The History tab plays every clip from every run. Unwanted ones are a delete away; nothing expires.
5. Queue the backlog. On Pro, batch mode takes several episodes at once and works through them while you do something else.

What tondi won't do

Stated plainly, because it decides whether tondi fits your shows.

• No speaker tracking. A vertical clip shows the whole widescreen frame over a blurred copy of itself. For a single host on camera that looks right; for a wide two-shot of an interview, a tool that crops to whoever is speaking will look tighter.
• No audio-only episodes. tondi needs a video file. If your recorder gives you a video track, even a static one, that works.
• No YouTube links, no scheduling, no team seats. It works from a file and makes files.
• Apple Silicon Macs only, macOS 13 or later. The full requirements.
• English first. Other languages are transcribed and captioned, but the hook-word signals tondi uses to pick moments are English. How it picks.

Common questions

Can I use tondi commercially, for client work?

Yes. The licence covers personal and commercial work, on the Macs you own or control. Clips you make are yours; tondi claims nothing over them.

Does tondi keep a copy of the transcript anywhere?

Only next to the clips, as transcript.json in the output folder, so a second run on the same episode is faster. Delete the folder and it's gone. Nothing is kept by tondi or sent to tondi.app.

Can a client tell the clips were made with tondi?

On Pro, no — there is no watermark, and nothing in the file names tondi. On Free, a small tondi mark is on every export.

What does an editor with several shows pay?

$10 a month or $100 a year, for any number of episodes and any length. There is no per-show, per-minute or per-seat pricing.