About Mac Note Taker

The first version of Mac Note Taker was built after a cloud notetaker silently uploaded a sensitive call into a vendor backend that turned out to have looser data handling than the customer's NDA allowed. Nobody was malicious. The defaults were just wrong. We wanted a recorder where the worst-case data leak was "the file is on this Mac" and nothing else.

We started in early 2026, shipped a private beta a few weeks later, and have been quietly releasing every couple of weeks ever since.

• Meeting audio is some of the most sensitive content on your Mac. Treat it like a password, not a tweet.
• You should be able to read your own transcripts ten years from now, in any text editor on the planet. Open formats, no lock-in.
• Subscriptions for software you run on your own machine make no sense. Buy it once.
• A bot showing up on your call is a UX failure. The recorder should live next to the meeting, not inside it.

The app is native Swift / SwiftUI for macOS 14.2 and up, Apple Silicon. Audio capture uses ScreenCaptureKit for the system side and AVAudioEngine for the mic. Transcription runs on-device with state-of-the-art speech models. Summaries use either a local Ollama model or your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint. We never run inference on our servers because we do not run servers that touch your meeting data.

Cloud notetakers buy convenience with your trust. Every recording becomes a row in someone else's database, processed by someone else's pipeline, retained according to someone else's policy. For HR conversations, customer calls under NDA, legal depositions, or anything you would not paste into a chatbot, that bargain is a bad deal.

Local-first inverts it. The audio file lives on your SSD. The transcript lives on your SSD. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you press export.

Mac Note Taker is built by a small remote team led by Ogtay. We are bootstrapped, indie, and have no plans to take outside money. We answer support email ourselves.

Reach us at [email protected]. Real reply, usually within a day.

Build the best meeting recorder for Mac that respects the recording. Ship it once for a price you pay once. Stay small. Keep the audio on the Mac.