Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel. I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there was enough fiddling before each call that I'd forget to start it and walk out of an hour-long meeting with nothing written down. So the things I cared about most were that it's quick to activate and stays out of the way. You activate Trace by pressing a global shortcut…
Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call launched on June 13, 2026 with 205 votes, #141 of 22,647 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Trace is a Mac app that records and transcribes meetings locally on your device using keyboard shortcuts. Activated by a customizable global shortcut, it displays a minimal interface bar that can be hidden entirely. Designed for quick activation and minimal disruption, Trace lets users flag important moments mid-call and processes all transcription on-device without sending audio elsewhere. It's built for professionals who need meeting records without the setup friction of other transcription tools.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A macOS menu-bar app that turns any conversation into a clean markdown transcript, with a local speech model running entirely on-device. One global shortcut brings up a small bar at the bottom of your screen. It captures your mic and the system audio as separate tracks, labels who said what, and lets you flag key moments mid-call that sit inline at the right timestamp. No bot joins the call, nothing leaves your Mac, no account, no subscription.
What each version of Trace added, newest first. Every update runs on your Mac.
Every release, newest first, with the story behind it and the full list of fixes. It mirrors the What’s New screen inside the app. Trace 2.16 rebuilds the whole browsing side of the app. The complaint we kept hearing, and felt ourselves, was that Trace got messier the more you used it. The window opened on whichever recording you made last and every recording sat in one flat list, which is fine at ten recordings and hopeless at two hundred. There is now a home screen that opens on today, folders to file recordings into, a rebuilt reader, and one Ask that can look at everything, one folder, or one recording. Search has been rebuilt underneath it too. Results are ranked by how well they match…from traceapp.info
In the maker’s words, at launch
I'm the developer of Trace, a non-intrusive, shortcut-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on-device. I know, another meeting transcription app. Please bear with me though, I'm confident that this is at least a little novel. I primarily built Trace for myself. I'd been using MacWhisper, but there…
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SpeechmarkSep 2026 · speechmark.co · ▲101Record, transcribe, and summarize meetings entirely on your Mac — decisions, action items, speaker-attributed transcripts. No bot, no account, pay once.
Cassette 2.02017 · cassette.design · ▲500Record, transcribe & search user interviews, meetings, calls
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