Features
What you need to capture, organize, and review your meetings, all built in. No plugins, and nothing leaves your machine.
Core
What you get on day one. Detect a meeting, record it, transcribe it, summarize it, and find it again later.
Auto-detection
Watches running applications for Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Proton Meet, and Jitsi, and watches the microphone for Signal, Element, and Telegram. When a meeting begins, autorec shows a 10-second heads-up. Recording starts when it runs out, sooner if you accept, and not at all if you decline. It stops when the meeting ends. You can turn the prompt off.
Recording engine
A lightweight built-in recording engine that uses your GPU when one is available and falls back to software encoding when it isn't. Output is a standard .mp4 file at 1080p, 720p, or 480p. Nothing else to install.
Window-specific capture
Captures only the meeting window, not your whole screen. Private chats, emails, and other windows stay off the recording. Files live on your disk. No cloud, no telemetry.
Per-source audio toggles
Mic and desktop audio each get their own toggle, device picker, gain slider, and live level meter. Pick whole-desktop or specific-apps-only mode, and dial in two-way or mic-priority ducking so neither side gets buried.
Automatic transcription
With auto-transcribe on, autorec runs whisper.cpp on each finished recording locally and writes a plain-text transcript plus a subtitle (.srt) file. It works in 17 languages, including German, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic, and figures out which one is being spoken by itself. If your calls are always in one language, pin it in Settings. You can pick the model size you want; download it once and use it forever. Audio stays on your machine.
AI-powered summaries
Optional. Plug in your own API key for any OpenAI-compatible service (OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, or a local Ollama or llama.cpp server) and autorec generates titles and summaries. Only the transcript text is sent. Audio and video never leave the machine.
Provider presets
One dropdown switches between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Groq, Cerebras and a dozen more, plus local servers (Ollama, LM Studio, LocalAI, llama.cpp, vLLM). Pick one and the base URL and a sensible default model fill themselves in.
Editable AI summary prompt
Customize the system prompt that drives every AI summary. Ask for decisions, action items, risks, deadlines — whatever your team actually reads. The default returns a clean JSON shape so your library still gets meeting titles automatically.
Built-in video library
Browse recordings as a card grid or a table, with auto-generated thumbnails. Search titles and summaries; sort by date, name, duration or size. Recordings play in an embedded video player. No need to open anything else.
Processing queue with live progress
Every transcription, summary, and compress job lands in a single processing list with per-task progress, status, and cancel controls. Filter by active, completed, or failed. Close the window and the queue keeps working in the background.
Transcript viewer and editor
View transcripts next to the video with clickable timestamps. Jump to any moment in the recording. Edit transcripts inline and save changes back to the .txt file on disk.
Trim and compress
Trim dead time off the start and end of a recording. Compress files to save disk space using preset percentages or a custom target size. Every job shows up in one processing queue.
System tray integration
Lives in your system tray, out of the way. Right-click to force-start a full-screen recording, pause, resume or stop, or open the recordings folder.
Honest shareware licensing
Three free recordings every 24 hours, up to 40 minutes each, with a five-minute heads-up before auto-stop. Pay once and the cap goes away; one key activates up to five devices. No DRM beyond a polite nag.
Configurable settings
Output directory, filename templates, quality presets, per-app toggles, transcription model, AI service configuration. All of it sits in a clean settings panel. Settings persist as plain JSON in your config directory, so you can read or edit them yourself.
Advanced and power-user controls
Eight more knobs for the people who want to tune autorec, automate around it, or wire it into a larger workflow.
Custom meeting watchers
Match any app or browser tab, including ones autorec doesn't know about yet. Add your own watchers for Discord, Slack huddles, Whereby, Webex, or any window or URL you want recorded.
For power users: Trigger on a window title, a browser URL, microphone use, or the app running at all. Exact, glob, or regex patterns, and an "Add an app" picker that fills in the process name for you. Per-watcher priorities, plus JSON import/export so you can share watchers across machines or teams.
Pro audio controls
Pick separate input devices for your mic and your system audio. Adjust gain, mute, and noise suppression independently for each source. Visual level meters show what is actually being captured.
For power users: Per-source device hot-swap mid-recording, ±24 dB gain in 0.5 dB steps, RNNoise plus OS-level noise suppression chain. Falls back gracefully if a device disconnects.
Smart audio ducking
Quiets the other side automatically when someone is speaking, so the two halves of the conversation don't drown each other out. Tune it for two-way calls or podcast-style mic priority.
For power users: Two-way or mic-priority modes. Trigger on RMS envelope or RNNoise voice activity detection. Configurable threshold, attack, release, and depth.
Apps-only desktop audio
Record audio from specific applications instead of every sound on your desktop. Music, notifications, and other windows stay out of the meeting recording.
For power users: Per-process selection on Linux (PipeWire/PulseAudio sink routing) and Windows (WASAPI loopback). Re-scans for newly running apps on demand.
Hardware encoder acceleration
Uses your GPU's video encoder when one is available, so recording barely touches your CPU. If no hardware encoder opens when recording starts, autorec uses a software encoder instead.
For power users: NVENC (NVIDIA), VideoToolbox (macOS) or Media Foundation (Windows), then libopenh264 in software. Intel and AMD hardware encoding on Linux is not supported yet. All paths are LGPL-clean.
Webhooks and automation
POST a notification (and optionally the file itself) to any URL when a recording, transcript, or summary finishes. Wire autorec into Notion, Obsidian, Zapier, n8n, or your own scripts.
For power users: HTTP multipart or SFTP upload, custom JSON templates with field interpolation, retry with exponential backoff, and per-event chaining (e.g. fire webhook B only after webhook A succeeds).
Unified processing queue
Every transcription, model download, trim, compress, and summary in one place. Cancel running jobs, retry the ones that failed, and run bulk actions across many recordings.
For power users: Task history persists across app restarts (~/.local/share/autorec/tasks.json). Per-task cancel cleans up subprocesses and temp files. Sidebar badge shows active task count.
Pause, resume, and manual override
Pause a recording mid-meeting and resume when you're back. Force-start or force-stop from the tray when auto-detection isn't doing what you want.
For power users: Paused time is excluded from the elapsed counter. The tray menu offers force-start (full screen), pause, resume and stop, and the status bar lets you switch the captured window mid-recording. Audio device hot-swap also works while recording.
See it in action
A short walkthrough of the full flow: detect, record, transcribe, library.