Alt Festival

An MCP server that lets Claude (Desktop or Code) read live notes and transcripts from Alt — a real-time lecture/meeting transcription app — while a recording is in progress.

Built for conference use: keep Alt recording a talk, and ask Claude questions about it live, with Claude pulling only the newly-transcribed lines each time instead of re-reading the whole transcript.

How it works

Alt runs a local HTTP API on your machine (localhost, token-authenticated) that its own apps use internally. This is not officially documented for third-party use, so treat it as unofficial and subject to breaking on Alt updates. This server reads the port/token from Alt's own local config file (~/Library/Application Support/alt/storage-httpServer.json on macOS) at request time and exposes a few read-only operations over MCP. It never stores or transmits the token anywhere else.

Nothing about your Alt data leaves your machine — this server only talks to localhost.

Tools

Tool	Description
list_recent_notes	List recently created/updated Alt notes. The most recent one is usually whatever's being recorded right now.
search_notes	Search notes by title.
get_note_info	Get a single note's title, date, and status.
list_note_components	List what components a note has (transcript, memo, summary, recording, meeting_notes, ...) without fetching their content.
get_note_transcript	Fetch a note's live transcript. Pass sinceIndex (the totalEntries value from your previous call) to get only newly-transcribed lines — avoids re-sending the whole growing transcript on every call.

Requirements

• Alt installed and running, with its local HTTP server enabled (this is the default).
• macOS. The config path is currently hardcoded to Alt's macOS data directory; Windows/Linux paths aren't handled yet.
• Node.js 20+.

Install

git clone https://github.com/dkfmaekdnjfk/alt-festival-mcp.git
cd alt-festival-mcp
npm install
npm run build

Register with Claude Code / Desktop

claude mcp add --scope user alt -- node /absolute/path/to/alt-festival-mcp/dist/index.js

Restart Claude Code/Desktop so it picks up the new server, then start a recording in Alt and ask Claude about it.

Example usage

"Alt에서 지금 녹음 중인 노트 열어서 지금까지 무슨 얘기했는지 알려줘" (Open whatever note Alt is currently recording and tell me what's been said so far)

Claude will call list_recent_notes to find the active note, then get_note_transcript to read it — and on later questions in the same conversation, pass sinceIndex so it only reads what's new.

Disclaimer

This project talks to an internal, undocumented local API that Alt happens to expose on your machine. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Alt. It may stop working after an Alt update that changes the API shape.