trnscrb

Offline meeting transcription for macOS — no cloud, no subscription.

trnscrb lives in your menu bar, listens for meetings, transcribes them locally with Whisper, and makes every transcript searchable from Claude Desktop via MCP.

---

Install

brew tap ajayrmk/tap
brew install trnscrb
trnscrb install

Or with pip / uv:

pip install trnscrb && trnscrb install
uv tool install trnscrb && trnscrb install

trnscrb install is a guided setup that handles:

• BlackHole 2ch audio driver (captures system audio alongside mic)
• HuggingFace token for speaker diarization (pyannote)
• Whisper small model download (~500 MB, one-time)
• Claude Desktop MCP config
• Launch-at-login agent

---

Quick start

trnscrb start       # launch the menu bar app

With Auto-transcribe on (the default), trnscrb detects when a meeting starts — Google Meet, Zoom, Slack Huddle, Teams, FaceTime — and begins recording automatically. When the meeting ends, it stops, transcribes, and saves.

You can also trigger manually from the menu bar: Start Transcribing / Stop Transcribing.

---

How it works

---

Claude Desktop integration

After trnscrb install, Claude Desktop has these tools available:

---

CLI

trnscrb start               # launch menu bar app
trnscrb install             # guided setup / re-check dependencies
trnscrb list                # list saved transcripts
trnscrb show <id>           # print a transcript
trnscrb enrich <id>         # summarise + action items (needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY)
trnscrb mic-status          # live mic activity monitor — useful for debugging
trnscrb devices             # list audio input devices
trnscrb watch               # headless auto-transcribe, no menu bar

---

System audio with BlackHole

To capture both your mic and the other participants' audio:

1. Install BlackHole via trnscrb install (or brew install blackhole-2ch)
2. Open Audio MIDI Setup → + → Create Multi-Output Device
3. Check BlackHole 2ch and MacBook Pro Speakers
4. System Settings → Sound → Output → select the Multi-Output Device

trnscrb auto-detects BlackHole and uses it when available. Without it, only your mic is recorded.

---

Transcript format

Meeting: Weekly Standup
Date:    2025-02-18 10:00
Duration:23:14

============================================================

[SPEAKER_00]
  00:12  Good morning, let's get started.

[SPEAKER_01]
  00:18  Morning! I finished the auth PR yesterday.

Running trnscrb enrich <id> replaces SPEAKER_00 / SPEAKER_01 with inferred names and appends a summary and action items block.

---

Requirements

• macOS 13 or later
• Python 3.11+
• Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) recommended — Whisper runs on Metal

---

Privacy

Everything runs on your machine. No audio or transcripts leave your device unless you explicitly run enrich, which sends the transcript text to the Claude API.

---

License

MIT