Documentation

FOR THE CURIOUS and the careful.

How to install and check Compendium Note, what is inside it, and where your data lives.

At a glance

THE essentials.

Version: Compendium Note 1.0 · Release notes
Runs on: Debian 13 (trixie), amd64 — a .deb package. A Flatpak is planned.
Licence: GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later)
App ID: ai.yarlath.CompendiumNote
Interface: English and Hungarian; listens in 26 languages, reads aloud in 17
Telemetry: None. No account, no ads, no tracking in the app.

Install & verify

ONE COMMAND, one check.

Download the .deb from the download block, then install it from the folder you saved it to:

sudo apt install ./compendium-note_1.0-*_amd64.deb

Before installing, compare the package’s checksum with the one in the release notes:

sha256sum compendium-note_1.0-*_amd64.deb

A newer package replaces the previous version — install it the same way. To remove the app:

sudo apt remove compendium-note

Releases

ON A FIXED rhythm.

Releases are planned quarterly. Every release has its notes and its checksum; a release, once published, never changes under the same name. The roadmap shows what comes next.

Your data

IT STAYS yours.

A notebook is one file. Every notebook is a single SQLite file (.ynote): copy it, back it up, open it with any SQLite tool.
No account, ever. Your notes stay on your computer. The internet is used only when you say yes — to download a speech model, for example.
Your AI. Speech recognition, read-aloud and the local AI run on your own machine by default. If you prefer, you can plug in your own Anthropic API key.
OneNote in, nothing out. OneNote .one files import one way; nothing is ever written back to them.

Authenticity

PROVE WHEN IT existed.

Authorship can be anchored with OpenTimestamps: it proves when a note existed and that it is intact since — not who wrote it. Check it yourself with compendium-note-verify.

Android Companion

THE PHONE, offline.

Compendium Companion for Android reads your notebooks and takes dictation offline. It has no internet permission at all — and anyone can check. Its runtime parts are AndroidX and Jetpack Compose (Apache-2.0) and the sherpa-onnx library (Apache-2.0, with onnxruntime under MIT).

Bill of materials

WHAT IS inside.

The Python packages in the desktop app’s runtime, with their licences (measured 3 November 2026; the package’s own copyright file lists every component). There is no GPL or AGPL Python package among them.

Package	Version	Licence
PySide6 · PySide6-Addons · PySide6-Essentials · shiboken6	6.11.2	LGPL-3.0 / GPL-2.0 / GPL-3.0 (by choice)
numpy	2.5.3	BSD-3-Clause and others
cryptography	50.0.1	Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause
pyenchant	3.3.0	LGPL (uses the system libenchant-2)
faster-whisper · ctranslate2 · onnxruntime	1.2.1 · 4.8.2 · 1.30.0	MIT
av (PyAV)	18.1.0	BSD-3-Clause; its bundled FFmpeg is LGPL-3.0-or-later, with x264/x265 (GPL-2.0-or-later) that the app never uses
tokenizers · huggingface_hub · hf-xet · flatbuffers	0.23.2 · 1.33.0 · 1.8.0 · 25.12.19	Apache-2.0
certifi · tqdm	2026.10.23 · 4.70.1	MPL-2.0 (tqdm: MPL-2.0 AND MIT)
protobuf · packaging · typing_extensions	7.36.2 · 26.3 · 4.16.0	BSD-3-Clause · Apache-2.0 OR BSD-2-Clause · PSF-2.0
cffi · pycparser · click · filelock · fsspec · h11 · httpcore · httpx · idna · anyio · PyYAML	—	MIT-0 / BSD-3-Clause / MIT

Installed only on request — not part of the package

Component	Licence	How it runs
piper-tts (read-aloud)	GPL-3.0	a separate process; voices download on first use
pix2tex + torch (handwritten maths)	MIT / BSD	a separate process
sherpa-onnx	Apache-2.0	speech, on demand
Seshat	GPL-3.0	a separate process
tesseract	Apache-2.0	a separate process

Source & licence

OPEN, in Europe.

Compendium Note is free software under the GNU GPL v3 or later. The source code goes public with 1.0, hosted in Europe — with a readable development journal beside it.

Report a problem

FOUND A bug?

Write to [email protected] — what you did, what you expected, and what happened. For a security issue, put “Security” in the subject.