Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcription, overhauled from HN feedback
traceapp.info
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.