Capture both sides, deliberately.

Start and stop a recording

Every manual entry point uses the same recording lifecycle:

• Click the Meeting Maid menu bar item and choose Start Recording.
• Use the recording control beside the main-window sidebar toggle.
• Choose Recording > Start Recording.
• Add Meeting Maid's Record a Meeting control to macOS Control Center.

Stop from the menu bar, main window, Recording menu, or Control Center. Processing begins immediately after both audio writers are finalized.

Verify audio before the agenda starts

1. Choose one microphone. In Settings > Recording > Microphone, select an input or leave System default. A disconnected choice falls back to the system default.
2. Enable the other participants. Turn on Record the other participants. This captures the system mix through ScreenCaptureKit; there is no per-output-device selector.
3. Watch Levels. Open Settings > Recording > Levels. Speak and play audio to confirm both meters move before joining the meeting.

Meeting Maid records a single microphone. To combine several physical microphones, route them into a virtual or aggregate device and select that device. The app balances captured microphone and system speech levels after recording; it does not expose a gain control.

Use the controls while recording

• The timer shows elapsed recording duration.
• Separate meters show microphone and system-audio activity.
• Mute microphone silences your side without tearing down the device, which helps avoid Bluetooth mode switching.
• A live transcript appears in the menu bar and active meeting when AWS Transcribe is selected.
• Processing and warning notices appear in the menu bar, sidebar, and beside the selected meeting title.

Record supported calls automatically

Open Settings > Recording and turn on Start recording automatically when a call begins. Meeting Maid detects supported Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Chime calls using native conferencing signals. Slack huddles use joined-huddle controls and require a separate Accessibility grant.

• Fresh call evidence must remain present for several seconds; timeouts and long polling gaps restart the pending check.
• Brief audio dropouts and headset changes do not immediately end an automatic recording.
• An automatically started recording stops when the detected call ends.
• Meeting Maid never stops a recording you started manually.
• It never starts a second recording while one is already active.
• Use the Record button for unsupported calling apps or browser-hosted calls.

Record Slack huddles automatically

1. Use Slack desktop.Open the Slack desktop app for Mac with its English interface.
2. Enable automatic recording.In Meeting Maid, open Settings > Recording and turn on Start recording automatically when a call begins.
3. Grant Accessibility access.If access is not already granted, choose Enable Slack Huddle Detection, then allow Meeting Maid under System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility.
4. Join a huddle.Return to Meeting Maid, then start or join a huddle in Slack. Allow several seconds for sustained joined-huddle evidence to start recording.

Meeting Maid checks Slack's joined-huddle controls, including muted and minimized huddles. An idle Slack audio helper, voice clip, pre-join screen, or Huddles history page does not qualify. Leaving the huddle ends an automatic recording after the normal stop delay; a recording you started manually remains yours to stop.

Slack's mute button does not mute Meeting Maid's microphone. Use Meeting Maid's Mute microphone control to silence your side of the recording.

Missing or unreadable huddle controls cannot start a recording. If controls become unreadable during a recorded huddle, Meeting Maid preserves the current recording rather than assuming the call ended. See Slack troubleshooting.

Import existing audio or video

Choose File > Import Audio or Video, press Command+O, or use Import Audio beside the main-window sidebar toggle.

Imports use the same transcription, speaker, note, and export pipeline as live recordings. For calendar matching, Meeting Maid uses the best embedded or filesystem timestamp available and accounts for media duration instead of pretending the import time was the recording time.

Understand the safety limits

Control source-audio retention

Source audio is kept forever by default under ~/Library/Application Support/MeetingMaid/Recordings/. Open Settings > Recording > Source Audio Retention to preview a shorter window for meeting-linked and unlinked legacy audio separately.

1. Select a window. Choices range from three years through one day, plus Forever.
2. Review the preview. Selection alone does not change the saved policy.
3. Click Apply and confirm. Only then is the retention policy saved.

Cleanup runs after launch recovery and once per day. It can permanently remove eligible playback audio while preserving the meeting record, transcript, and notes. Active, processing, importing, loaded, recent, unsafe-path, shared-path, and undated audio remains protected. Unlinked legacy groups use their last-modified dates.

Recover after an interruption

On the next launch, Meeting Maid retries an interrupted recording only when the surviving file is larger than the conservative 4,096-byte header-only ceiling. Retries are bounded so one damaged file cannot block startup indefinitely.

• If the transcript survived, open the meeting and use Generate Notes again.
• If only audio survived, use Share > Export Audio, then import the exported M4A to retry processing.
• If the library was repaired or quarantined, read the recovery notice before moving any managed files.