There was a time when meetings were my life. What a perfect time to have a twin or a clone. Businesses and organizations seem to thrive on meetings. Keeping track of who said what in a meeting can be a challenge (many attendees don’t want an audit trail of commitments).
What every Mac user who has too many meetings to go to really needs is a Mac app that records all the details of a meeting, including attendees and the audio. That’s what Microcone Recorder does.
This isn’t just an audio recorder with an option for meeting notes. It’s actually a meeting records system. It records talk time, does a keyword summary of notes, even has a speech-to-text converter.
Sounds great, right? You can assign one person in a meeting to manage the recording and notes. The app displays a list of meeting recordings. There’s a timeline of which participant spoke.
Plus, there’s a place for keywords, notes, and meeting highlights. These are exactly the kinds of functions that businesses and organization typically want to track.
What’s not to like? The details.
Microcone Recorder is the Mac app. To get multi-track audio recording you’ll also need the Microcone recording device. It’s a haystack-shaped device that’s good for recording audio of up to six people around a conference table.
Microcone Recorder (the Mac app) costs less than $5.00. It works with the microphone in your Mac. The Microcone USB microphone array recording device is more expensive, but delivers higher quality, especially with speech-to-text (provided by Nuance, the technology behind Apple’s Siri intelligent assistant).
After reading your review I went to the app store- only 2 reviews there- neither was positive. Have you even tried this product? Both app store reviews pointed out that transcription of meetings is something priced separately- pretty important item…
Our company uses the Microcone mic in the conference room. It works quite well, but is a bit more expensive than most meeting microphones. We just tried the notes app and it works well for a first generation product. It would be better if there were a way to print out notes. And, as you point out, it’s better to have one person designated as the meeting note taker to manage the app during a conference call or meeting. I’m surprised there are not more of these kinds of meeting notes apps.
We currently support printing of Notes and Highlights and are working adding printing of transcriptions.
http://www.dev-audio.com/products/recorder/
I’ve used Audio Note and like it. It’s not as complicated as the Microcone app. Simplistic, actually. And the MacBook microphone leaves much to be desired. But it works. Record audio and type in notes which are synchronized with the audio’s timeline.
I like Smart Recorder. Same price. It records the time as you take notes, but also features a heading tag for notes. And, the notes can be played back at slow, fast, faster, or fastest speeds.