How to get your meetings into Obsidian automatically

The problem with meeting notes in Obsidian

If you use Obsidian as your second brain, you've probably tried to get meeting notes into your vault. The options are all frustrating. Copy-paste from Zoom chat. Screenshot a whiteboard. Manually type up your notes after the call. Use a plugin that breaks every other update. Pay for a service that syncs through someone else's cloud.

The r/ObsidianMD community has been asking for a clean solution to this for years. The ideal: record a meeting, and a well-formatted markdown transcript appears in your vault automatically. No intermediary. No subscription. No plugin dependency.

Transcripted does exactly this. Here's how to set it up in under five minutes.

Step 1: Install Transcripted

Download Transcripted from GitHub releases. It's a standard macOS app — drag it to Applications, open it, grant microphone and screen recording permissions when prompted. That's it. No account creation, no license key, no onboarding flow.

Transcripted requires macOS 14.2 or later on Apple Silicon (M1 through M5). It uses the Neural Engine for transcription, so everything runs locally on your Mac.

Step 2: Configure the output folder

By default, Transcripted saves transcripts to ~/Documents/Transcripted/. You can change this in the app's settings to any folder on your Mac. The key insight: this folder is where your meeting transcripts will appear as markdown files. That's the folder you'll point Obsidian at.

If your Obsidian vault is at ~/Documents/Vault/, you have two options:

Option A: Set Transcripted's output folder to a subfolder inside your vault, like ~/Documents/Vault/Meetings/. Transcripts appear directly in your vault.

Option B: Keep the default ~/Documents/Transcripted/ folder and add it as a secondary vault folder in Obsidian, or create a symlink.

Option A is simpler. Set the output path, and you're done.

Step 3: There is no step 3

That's the whole setup. Record a meeting with Transcripted. When it finishes processing, a markdown file appears in your Obsidian vault. Open Obsidian and it's there — searchable, linkable, taggable, and ready to be connected to the rest of your knowledge graph.

What the transcript files look like

Each meeting produces a file named with the date and time, like 2026-03-15_standup.md. The content is clean, structured markdown:

# Meeting — March 15, 2026

**Duration:** 28 minutes
**Speakers:** Sarah Chen, Marcus Rivera, You

---

**Sarah Chen** [00:00:12]
Alright, let's go through the sprint items. Marcus, where are we on the API migration?

**Marcus Rivera** [00:00:18]
We finished the auth endpoints yesterday. The data layer is about 70% done. I think we'll have it wrapped by Thursday.

**You** [00:00:31]
Nice. Any blockers?

**Marcus Rivera** [00:00:34]
One thing — the rate limiting config needs a decision from product...

Every utterance is attributed to the correct speaker with timestamps. Because Transcripted learns voices across sessions, it identifies speakers by name — not "Speaker 1" and "Speaker 2." After a few meetings, your regular collaborators are recognized automatically.

Why this approach beats the alternatives

vs. Granola + Obsidian: Granola removed their local Obsidian sync in early 2026. Their replacement is a cloud MCP server — your meeting data flows through Granola's infrastructure to reach your tools. Transcripted's approach is the opposite: files on your disk, read directly by Obsidian. No intermediary, no cloud, no dependency on a third-party service staying in business or keeping a feature.

vs. Obsidian plugins: There are community plugins that try to record and transcribe meetings inside Obsidian. They tend to break with Obsidian updates, depend on external APIs (usually OpenAI Whisper), and lack speaker identification. Transcripted is a standalone app that happens to produce files Obsidian can read — it doesn't depend on Obsidian's plugin system at all.

vs. Otter.ai / Fireflies export: You can export transcripts from cloud services and manually save them to your vault. But that's manual, the exported format is often messy HTML, and the audio was already processed on someone else's servers. Transcripted produces clean markdown automatically, locally, with no export step.

vs. manual notes: You could just take notes during meetings. But you'll miss things. You'll paraphrase incorrectly. You won't have timestamps. And you can't take notes and be fully present in the conversation at the same time. Transcripted captures everything so you can focus on the meeting itself.

The Obsidian power moves

Once your meetings are markdown files in your vault, Obsidian's features work on them natively:

Search. Cmd+Shift+F to search across all your meetings. Find every time someone mentioned "Q3 roadmap" or "budget approval" across months of meetings.

Links. Link meeting notes to project pages, people notes, or decision logs. Build a web of context that connects conversations to outcomes.

Tags. Tag meetings by project, team, or topic. Filter your vault to see all product meetings this quarter.

Dataview. If you use the Dataview plugin, you can query your meetings programmatically. Show all meetings with a specific person, sorted by date, with key quotes extracted.

AI agents. Point Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any agent at your vault folder. Your meeting history becomes queryable context. "What did the team decide about the API migration?" gets a real answer grounded in actual transcripts.

Plain files are the right abstraction

The reason this works so well is that Transcripted chose the right output format. Not a proprietary database. Not a cloud API. Not a plugin protocol. Just markdown files on your filesystem.

Markdown is the universal interface. Every tool can read it. Every agent can parse it. Every backup system can sync it. If Transcripted disappears tomorrow, your meeting history is still there — readable, portable, yours.

That's the whole point of local-first software. Your data survives the tools you use to create it.