Guides.
Recording meetings, keeping the notes as files, and dictating into Mac apps: what the system gives you for recording and transcription, where the audio goes, and how the note is written and filed. Each one answers its question the whole way down rather than introducing it.
Meeting notes as Markdown files
What changes when a note is a file with a path instead of a row in someone else’s database, and the five things a folder of files cannot do.
Read the guide
Transcribe meeting audio on your Mac
Three routes from recorded audio to text without an upload, what each one costs to set up, and where on-device transcription runs out.
Read the guide
Local vs cloud transcription
Where the audio goes in each case, what still works on a plane, what the two really cost, and the places the cloud is ahead.
Read the guide
System audio and the microphone
How macOS lets an app hear your speakers and your microphone at once, why the prompt asks for screen recording, and why some tools send a bot into the call instead.
Read the guide
Meeting note templates for Obsidian
Six Markdown templates for standups, client calls, interviews, decisions and retros, on one shared set of frontmatter fields and no plugin.
Read the guide
The two permissions Mac dictation needs
What Microphone and Accessibility are each for, why a macOS update can quietly drop the second one, and how to get the key working again when it does nothing.
Read the guide
Recording, one platform at a time
Microsoft Teams, FaceTime and Slack huddles on a Mac, each with the free QuickTime route and the one setting that quietly breaks it.
Read the guides
Where to start.
For dictation setup, or for a key that does nothing, start with the permissions guide.
If you came here from a search for one platform, the shortest path is the recording pages: Teams, FaceTime and Slack huddles, each answering its own question before the general one.
If you are deciding whether any of this is for you, read the one about files first: everything else here follows from a note being a document on your disk rather than a row in a service. If you already keep a vault, the Obsidian templates are the shortest way to a note you can reuse tomorrow.
If you are here for the mechanics, the pair to read together is system audio and the microphone, which is how a meeting gets captured at all, and local vs cloud, which is what happens to the recording afterwards.
What the guides describe is what the app does: Aside records the call on your Mac, transcribes it there, and writes the meeting into a folder you pick as a Markdown file you can open in anything. Hold fn and it dictates into any other Mac app, on the same machine. The facts page is the short version of that, and the benchmarks are how the transcription is measured.