A year of meetings, and my minutes are plain text files on my own disk

I've sat through a lot of meetings. The kind where you walk out, someone emails "what did we decide?" and nobody can agree. That's the reason I started dumping every meeting into a tool called Local Meeting Notes instead of trusting the built-in recorder. But what sold me in the long run wasn't the summaries. It was that the output is just text I actually own.

The app records the mic plus system audio. Teams, Zoom, Meet, or a room. Whisper does the transcription on my CPU, and LM Studio (free, any small model loaded) turns that raw transcript into structured minutes: a summary, the key decisions, action items with owners and dates where people said them, and open questions. Then it exports to Markdown, text, or PDF.

The Markdown part is the sleeper feature. Every meeting becomes a plain file. I keep them in one folder, one per meeting, and grep across all of them.

grep -ri "deadline" notes/

That one line has settled more arguments than any meeting tool I've used. Someone claims we never agreed to ship by Friday? Past week's minutes, in the terminal, on the spot. No logging into a portal, no "trial expired," no export that turns into a tidy PDF I can't search later.

That's what keeps annoying me about meeting-notes SaaS. Your minutes live in their database, formatted their way, and the day you stop paying, the search goes with them. Local files with dates in the filename don't vanish. They don't get upgraded into a format half my terminal tools choke on. They sit there as long as the disk does.

PDF export exists for the people who need something to attach to an email or file away. But honestly, if a meeting matters, I want it as text where regex works.

The practical bits, since that's the part people actually ask about:

• Needs Windows 10/11 and Python 3.10+. LM Studio is free and you don't need a big model; a small one writes perfectly fine minutes.
• Runs on CPU. Transcription gets chatty on an older laptop but it works; a GPU just makes the Whisper step faster.
• Before you record anyone, check whether recording is regulated where you work and get consent. That's on you whether it's a client call or a one-on-one. This is a tool for your own minutes, not a way to dodge the question.

The whole thing is $9 one-time at symshah.gumroad.com/l/xgoypx. No account, no subscription, nothing uploaded.

What I actually got out of this wasn't shinier meeting notes. It's that I stopped re-litigating what was decided, because the answer lives in a folder on my machine I can actually search.