Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcription, overhauled from HN feedback

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Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcription, overhauled from HN feedback

A couple of months ago I posted about Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app, but we've had a great response and I'm confident it fills a niche. Here's the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48521236 We've been working hard to bring community feedback on board, and the app is now so much more capable that it deserved a new post. Trace is still a minimal, out-of-the-way alternative to MacWhisper, but it's grown a lot of features since then, and the vast majority came from suggestions in the original HN thread. The biggest additions, to me, are below (full list here: https://traceapp.info/changelog ). - Trace used to live entirely in the menu bar and push everything out through the clipboard. It now has a History window to read, search, replay and manage every transcript in one place. From there you can correct transcription errors, label speakers and export to other apps. - Trace is now meeting-aware. When an app starts using the microphone, it prompts you to record, and you can teach it to auto-record on a per-app basis. It also offers to stop once the microphone is released, which was one of the most common requests (people kept forgetting to stop a recording when they'd hidden the pill). - There's a new in-person mode, so a meeting held in the same room is picked up through the mic and split correctly by speaker rather than coming out as one long monologue. - Speaker memory now persists between calls, so Trace can suggest names for voices it recognises. This massively speeds up naming participants. - Alongside marking key moments, you can now grab screenshots. Trace runs OCR on the capture and saves the text with the transcript, so it's searchable. - On-device summaries give you a short recap of the meeting, generated by a local model (Qwen by default, though you can switch it out or point Trace at your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint). - If you're about to join a call with people you've met before, Trace briefs you on what you discussed last time to get you up to speed. - Trace now detects the meeting language, so the live recap can translate in real time, and it handles non-English languages far better than before. - External audio and video files can now be imported and transcribed. - There's a separate tracecli tool for driving Trace from the command line. It includes "tracecli transcript --live --follow", which streams an accurate transcript while the meeting is still running. I use this to let a local LLM follow along live with a meeting. We also included a few quality-of-life fixes raised in the original thread. Audio is now written to disk as you record, so a mid-meeting crash can't corrupt the recording, the echo cancellation algorithm has been rewritten and there's a direct download for people who can't or don't want to use the App Store. Based on feedback that Trace was priced too low, we've also reworked the licensing. It's still a one-time lifetime licence with lifetime updates and no upgrade fees, but it now starts at £29 for a single Mac, with multi-Mac options too. There's also a 7-day free trial, so you can put it through its paces on a week of real calls before committing. Feedback is very welcome.