Crash-safe recording and recovery

A crash, a force quit, a kernel panic or a dead battery shouldn't cost you a meeting. recd is built so it doesn't.

How it works#

• The recording is on disk the whole time. recd writes in small pieces as it records, rather than all at once at the end. Whatever was captured up to the moment something went wrong is already saved.
• A note goes down first. Before capture starts, recd writes a small recovery file beside the recording, saying what's being recorded and where it should be saved. It's removed only once the recording is safely saved.
• Your meeting notes are kept as you type, so they come back too.

All of this lives in ~/Movies/recd, in the Raw and Meeting tracks folders.

What you'll see#

Next time recd opens, it looks for recordings that never finished, rebuilds a playable file from the pieces, and saves it the normal way: same save place, same folder layout, a Drive link, and for a meeting the transcript and AI notes.

The full window then says Recovered your recording from and the time, with two buttons:

• Open plays the recovered recording.
• Discard moves it to the Trash, if you didn't want it.

If more than one was recovered, it says how many and when the latest was from. The menu bar menu shows the same notice, with Open recd to keep or retry….

If it can't be recovered#

• If nothing playable was captured, such as a crash in the first instant, recd says A recording from … couldn't be recovered and leaves the original file in ~/Movies/recd in case you want to try it by hand.
• If the rebuilt file won't save, recd keeps it and offers Retry save. See “Couldn’t finish saving”.