Folio documentation

Folio is a menu-bar app for macOS 13+. When a meeting starts it records your system audio and your microphone as two independent streams, transcribes them on-device, and writes one markdown note per meeting into a vault path you choose. No meeting bot joins the call. There is no Google OAuth and no Microsoft Graph. Folio watches your calendar and audio devices locally through EventKit.

The promise is simple. On the default path your audio never leaves your machine. Local transcription with whisper.cpp is the primary path, on-device diarization separates voices, and the notes are plain markdown files you can read, edit, search, and back up with any tool. Folio is Apache-2.0 licensed and open source on GitHub.

A few decisions shape everything else in Folio. Each one keeps your data on your machine and under your control.

• Two-stream capture. System audio and the microphone are recorded as separate streams. The microphone track is always labelled You.
• On-device transcription. The bundled backend is whisper.cpp through the whisper-rs bindings, Metal-accelerated on Apple Silicon. The cloud is an opt-in fallback, never the default.
• On-device diarization. Voices on the system-audio track are clustered into Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on, with no cloud involved.
• One markdown note per meeting. Each meeting becomes a single markdown file in your vault, with frontmatter for attendees, duration, model, and source.
• A local MCP server. folio-mcp gives MCP-aware tools read-only access to your transcripts, tasks, and memories over stdio. No cloud, no proxy.
• Privacy Mode. A single switch physically blocks every outbound HTTP call except localhost.

Folio runs in your menu bar and watches for meetings. When one starts it captures system audio and your microphone, transcribes the audio on-device, separates the speakers, and writes a finished markdown note into your vault. The vault is just a folder of files. From there your notes are searchable on disk, readable in any editor, and reachable by MCP-aware tools through the local server.

Pick the path that matches what you need next.