Using Folio

Folio is a menu-bar app. After you install it, it lives in the macOS menu bar rather than the Dock, and it watches your calendar and audio devices through EventKit. There is no window to keep open and no bot that joins your calls.

On the first run, macOS prompts for two permissions. It asks for microphone access so Folio can record your voice, and for screen recording access, which is required to capture system audio from the other participants. Grant both. Without screen recording permission, the system-audio stream cannot be captured.

Folio also downloads its model weights once on first use, the first time it transcribes or diarizes locally. After that the on-device path works without a network connection.

Finally, choose a vault path. This is the folder where Folio writes one markdown file per meeting. Point it at a plain directory, an existing notes folder, or anywhere you already back up. The files are ordinary markdown, so any editor or sync tool can read them.

Folio captures two independent streams for every meeting. One is the system audio of everyone else on the call. The other is your microphone. Keeping them separate is what makes accurate speaker labels possible later.

Each meeting becomes one markdown file you can read, edit, search, and back up with any tool. The file opens with YAML frontmatter, followed by the speaker-labelled transcript and the decisions and tasks drawn from it.

The frontmatter block records the structured facts about the meeting.

Below the frontmatter sits the speaker-labelled transcript. Your own microphone is always shown as You, and the system-audio voices appear as Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on. Folio also surfaces the decisions and tasks from the conversation so the note is more than a wall of text.

Because the file is plain markdown, you stay in control. Rename a speaker, fix a word, add a heading, or move the file. The note is yours to keep.

Notes accumulate into a vault you can navigate from inside Folio. You can pull up past meetings, find the tasks that came out of them, and search across the memory built from your notes.

The on-disk markdown files are the source of truth. Folio uses a two-phase write, where the canonical file is written first and the derived index second. The index is always rebuildable from the files, so nothing is locked inside a database you cannot read.

The same data is also reachable from MCP-aware tools through the local folio-mcp server, which gives read-only access to your transcripts, tasks, and memories over stdio. See Connectors for how to wire it up.

The default transcription path is local. Folio bundles whisper.cpp through the whisper-rs bindings, Metal-accelerated on Apple Silicon, and this is the primary path for every meeting.

For long meetings, the OpenAI Whisper API is available as an opt-in fallback for faster cloud transcription. It needs an OpenAI key, and you turn it on yourself. It is never the default, and the local path keeps working without it.

When you want Folio fully airgapped, turn on Privacy Mode under Settings then Privacy. It physically blocks every outbound HTTP call except localhost. The app keeps working end to end with Wi-Fi off.

Folio makes very few network calls to begin with. A one-time model-weights download happens on first local transcription or diarization, and the opt-in cloud-AI and webhook paths are the only others. All of them can be blocked. Notes are also encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and Argon2id, and Folio ships no telemetry, analytics, or crash reporting.

For the full picture of what stays local and what crosses the network, read the Privacy page.

If you have not installed Folio yet, start with the install guide. To connect your notes to an MCP-aware tool, head to Connectors.

Hit a snag. Open an issue on GitHub or press ? inside the app.