First meeting I ever tried to record properly: I plugged in my headset, hit record in OBS, and thought I'd captured the whole call. When I played it back I got my own voice rambling into a void for forty minutes. The client's side was silent as a grave. A mic alone does not record a Teams call unless you happen to be the only person talking, which in my world is a rare and suspicious meeting.
That bugged me, because minutes are worthless if they only contain your half of the conversation. The decisions happen in the exchange, not in your monologue. So when I built my meeting notes tool, capturing both sides was the first requirement, not an afterthought.
The fix is a Windows thing called WASAPI loopback. It grabs whatever audio the machine is actually playing and lets you record it like it's another input. Teams, Zoom, Meet, a plain phone call on speaker, even the in-person meeting where someone plugged a USB speaker into the laptop. The remote end shows up. Combined with a normal mic capture for my own voice, I end up with a full two-sided recording instead of a one-sided transcript.
From there the pipeline is pretty straightforward. Faster-whisper transcribes it, all on the local CPU (a GPU just makes it quicker). Then a small model in LM Studio reads the plain transcript and writes actual minutes in the shape a human wants: a summary, the key decisions, action items with owners and dates where anyone actually said them, and the open questions that got tabled. Markdown, plain text, or PDF out. No meeting-app subscription, no cloud service, nothing leaving the machine.
Which brings me to the reason I stopped using my company's built-in meeting recorder in the first place. It gave me a transcript fine, but it also uploaded every word to a vendor's server, and I'm the guy who has to explain that to compliance when it comes up. A tool where the audio never leaves my own disk makes that conversation a lot shorter.
One honest note: recording meetings may be a regulated thing where you work, and even where it isn't, people tend to appreciate a heads-up. Get consent before you hit record. It's a ten-second courtesy that keeps a genuinely useful tool from becoming a policy violation.
The whole thing sits at $9 one-time and runs fully offline on a plain Windows 10/11 box with Python 3.10 and a free LM Studio model. If you've ever looked at a transcript and wished someone had just written the decisions down instead, it's worth a look: https://symshah.gumroad.com/l/xgoypx. It's the recording setup I wish I'd had at that first failed capture.
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