Horch vs Stable Audio

A side-by-side look at pricing, capabilities, pros, cons, and our editorial scores.

	Horch Audio	Stable Audio Audio
Tagline	Privacy-first, on-device meeting assistant for macOS	Stability AI's generative audio model family for music and sound effects, with open weights for the smaller variants.
Category	Audio	Audio
Pricing	Paid· One-time purchase: €49 once	Freemium· Free web app tier; API metered; enterprise licensing for Large model
Model	Whisper (local) for transcription; optional Ollama / MLX local LLMs for summarization	Stable Audio 3.0 (Large/Medium/Small/Small SFX)
Editorial score	—	7.1 / 10
Use cases	Confidential client meeting transcriptionAutomatic action-item extractionPer-contact relationship historyPre-meeting briefings from prior callsLocal Whisper transcription without cloud uploadFeeding meeting context into Claude or Cursor via MCPPersonal second-brain in MarkdownLegal, medical, or NDA-bound conversation notes	music-generationsound-effectsaudio-for-videogame-audiobackground-score
Pros	Fully on-device by default — audio and transcripts never leave the Mac unless the user opts in One-time €49 purchase instead of a recurring per-seat SaaS bill Records at OS level so no bot appears in the meeting and any app (Zoom, Meet, Teams, in-person) works Notes stored as plain Markdown in ~/Meetings — portable, greppable, Obsidian-friendly Auto-generates action items, topic summaries, and per-person profiles from spoken content MCP server exposes meeting history to Claude, Cursor, and other agent clients Local Whisper transcription plus optional Ollama/MLX means you pick the summarizer	Generates full tracks up to six minutes with strong prompt adherence Open weights available for Medium and Small variants on Hugging Face Trained on fully licensed data, reducing commercial-use risk Hosted API plus self-host options cover most deployment shapes
Cons	macOS only — no Windows, Linux, iOS, or web client Local Whisper and summarization need a reasonably modern Apple Silicon Mac to feel fast No cloud sync or team workspace, so sharing across a team requires bring-your-own storage Small independent product without the integrations catalog of Fireflies, Otter, or Fathom OS-level capture depends on macOS screen/audio permissions, which some corporate MDM setups block	No transparent pricing for API or enterprise tier on the page Vocal generation and long-form song structure remain weak spots Smaller open-weight variants trail the Large model in fidelity
Website	horch.app	stability.ai

Pick Horch if

✅ Fully on-device by default — audio and transcripts never leave the Mac unless the user opts in
✅ One-time €49 purchase instead of a recurring per-seat SaaS bill
✅ Records at OS level so no bot appears in the meeting and any app (Zoom, Meet, Teams, in-person) works
✅ Notes stored as plain Markdown in ~/Meetings — portable, greppable, Obsidian-friendly

Pick Stable Audio if

✅ Generates full tracks up to six minutes with strong prompt adherence
✅ Open weights available for Medium and Small variants on Hugging Face
✅ Trained on fully licensed data, reducing commercial-use risk
✅ Hosted API plus self-host options cover most deployment shapes

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