TL;DR
A recording isn't a note. It's a recording.
To get anything out of it, you have to transcribe it — and nobody does that, so the files just sit there and pile up. I built myself something that walks that path for me, on my own Mac, and for the first time I have a folder of transcripts I actually go back to.
Details
I record a lot. Meetings, workshops, sometimes a thought tossed into a voice recorder on a walk. For years it always ended the same way — a directory of audio files I can't remember a month later and never return to, because to return to them I'd first have to listen through the whole thing, and who has time for that.
At some point I realized the problem was never on the recording side. Every phone, watch, and hundred-zloty voice recorder can record today. The whole gap is on the other side — between something being recorded and being able to actually use it later. And nobody crosses that gap for us.
So I wrote a tool that crosses it. I plug in the card from my voice recorder, and it detects the recordings on its own, transcribes them on my Mac, and drops them as text straight into my notes. I fired it up on August 3, 2025. The first thing it transcribed was my note about how to solve foundation drainage in the new barn. Very much my style.
Since then it's piled up a hundred and fifty-nine transcripts — about a quarter of a million words and over thirty hours of me talking. The last entry is from today. If I had to transcribe all of it by hand, it would take well over a hundred hours — nearly three weeks of working keyboard tapping. Half of which, let's be honest, I'd never have touched.
Not all of it is pearls, by the way. The tool faithfully transcribed a recording where I say nothing but "OK." Another time, a solid minute of pocket noises. (I have it in writing.)
And yes, when you plug in the card and the text appears on its own, it looks a bit like magic. But that one I've known for a few years now — that it's not magic.
The best part of all this, though, isn't that something transcribes itself. The best part is that for the first time I have an archive of my own voice that I actually feel like going back to. And the fact that it happens on my desk, not on someone else's server — that's a topic for another time.