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Recording a meeting

Daisy records your meeting on your machine, transcribes it, and lets you take notes alongside the transcript. This article covers a recording from start to finish.

Starting a recording

  1. Open the Record view to reach the New recording screen.
  2. Set a Title. It defaults to the current time (for example, 11:24AM - Ad hoc), and you can change it.
  3. Pick a Microphone from the dropdown. This choice applies to the session only. Plug a headset in while you're on this screen and it shows up in the list straight away — no restart.
  4. Leave I'm the only person on my end checked if no one is sharing your mic. Turning it off tells Daisy to expect more than one local voice.
  5. Optionally add Tags up front.
  6. Click ● Start recording.

If no microphone is detected or the vault is locked, Daisy tells you before recording can begin.

During the recording

Once recording starts, the notebook layout shows:

  • A REC · HH:MM:SS pill with a live elapsed timer.
  • The live transcript, with Them (system audio) labeled and your own microphone lines alongside it, as speech comes in.
  • An editable Title, an in-call Mic switcher and mute button, a notes area (markdown supported), and a tag picker.

Your title saves when you click out of the field, notes save a moment after you stop typing, and tag changes save immediately — so you can keep everything current without interrupting the recording.

Daisy also watches your audio devices for the length of the recording. If your microphone is unplugged, muted in the system mixer, taken over by a call app, or goes quiet, a toast in the corner tells you what happened and what Daisy did about it — including switching you to another microphone and following that switch in the in-call picker. Your machine is also kept awake while a recording runs. See Microphones and audio devices.

Pausing and resuming

  • Click ❚❚ Pause recording to pause. A [paused at HH:MM:SS] marker is added to the transcript and the timer freezes.
  • Click ▶ Resume to continue the same session.

Discarding a recording

If you want to stop without keeping anything, click 🗑 Discard. Daisy asks you to confirm in a Discard recording? dialog, since the audio and transcript captured so far are permanently deleted and this can't be undone. Once you confirm, Daisy throws the recording away and returns you to the Library. To keep what you have, finish and summarize instead.

Finishing

When you're done, pause first, then click ✦ Finish & summarize. Daisy hands the session off to background processing — echo cancellation, transcript cleanup, speaker labels, and the summary — and returns you to the Library. You don't have to wait on this screen while it finishes.

A Finishing "" toast in the corner tracks progress through the stages. When the work is done it becomes a "" ready ✓ toast you can click to open the session (or transcribed ✓ if you have no AI provider set). If Daisy found new voices it couldn't name, you'll instead get a prompt with Label speakers and Later buttons.

If something crashes mid-recording

Long recordings rotate into bounded chunks on disk about every five minutes, so an unexpected crash loses at most the current open chunk. Reopen Daisy and the in-progress session is recovered; if a finalize was interrupted, a toast offers Resume to pick up where it left off, or Keep as-is.

Recovery is deliberately forgiving. A chunk that was being written when the power went is salvaged up to the last valid audio in it, an empty track still yields a session, and quitting the app with a recording running — including ⌘Q on macOS — flushes what's in flight to disk before Daisy exits.

The floating mini-window

If you want Daisy out of the way while you keep working, select Mini in the sidebar to minimize to a compact, always-on-top card. The mini-window shows:

  • The recording status and elapsed time.
  • A scrolling tail of the last few lines from the other side of the call, as caption bubbles. Your own voice is left out. Until someone else speaks it reads Waiting for others to speak….
  • Pause / Resume and Stop controls.

Select the restore control (⤢) on the card to bring the main window back. Choosing Stop from the mini-window confirms first (Stop recording?), then ends the meeting and starts finalizing — it's the one control that stops directly without pausing first.

When you navigate away

If a recording is running and you move to another view, a status toast shows Recording or Paused with an Open button that jumps you back to the recording screen. The sidebar's Record item also relabels to IN PROGRESS or PAUSED so you don't lose track of a live session.