Audio Playback & Retention
Does MimicScribe keep the audio of my meetings?
Yes, by default, and it deletes it again after 30 days. The audio lives on your Mac and is never uploaded.
It is kept so you can play the meeting back — to check a quote the transcript got wrong, or to hear a voice before you put a name to it. If you would rather it kept nothing, turn off Save meeting audio in Settings > Meetings > Meeting Recording.
How do I play a meeting back?
Three ways, depending on how much you want to hear:
- The whole meeting — press play in the meeting header. Playback follows the transcript as it goes.
- One turn — hover any turn in the Transcript tab and press its play button. It plays that turn and stops.
- A three-second sample of one speaker — when the app asks who a voice belongs to, the popover has a play button. You hear the person before you decide.
Playback starts and ends at natural pauses rather than at exact timestamps, so a turn does not open mid-word.
How long is audio kept?
Thirty days by default. Settings > Meetings > Meeting Recording > Audio retention offers 14 days, 30 days, 90 days, or Keep indefinitely.
Only the audio is deleted when the window passes. Transcripts, summaries, action items and notes are kept forever regardless of this setting — deleting a recording does not touch what was said in it.
What if I already had “save meeting audio” turned on?
Your recordings are kept indefinitely. Turning the feature on was an explicit choice to keep audio, so the 30-day default is not applied retroactively to anyone who had already opted in — you would have to pick a retention window yourself.
Older recordings that lived in your Documents folder are also left alone. They are not moved, not deleted, and not swept.
Where are recordings stored, and how big are they?
~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/Recordings/, in a directory that only your user account can read.
About 14 MB per hour — a single mono AAC track at 32 kbps, mixed from your microphone and the system audio. An hour-long meeting every workday for a month is roughly 300 MB at the default retention.
Recordings moved to Application Support in rc.31. They used to sit in your Documents folder, which meant macOS asked for permission to your Documents the first time a meeting saved — a prompt that had nothing to do with what the app was doing.
Can I get the audio file itself?
Yes — the file is a standard .m4a and you can open the Recordings folder in Finder. Nothing about it is proprietary.
Does keeping audio affect what gets sent anywhere?
No. Audio never leaves your Mac on any configuration — it is not uploaded for transcription, summarization, or anything else. Speech recognition and speaker separation run on the Neural Engine on your machine.
What does leave, if you have text-AI enabled, is transcript text — and it goes wherever you point it. See Privacy & Data for the full boundary.