MeetRec

MeetRec is a lightweight Windows tray recorder for meetings, calls, microphone audio, system audio, or both at the same time. It is designed to stay out of the way: configure it once, then start or stop recordings from the tray icon, a global hotkey, or the floating timer.

Current version: 1.0.3.

What's New In 1.0.3

• Settings are now stored under %APPDATA%\MeetRec\settings.json, so manual launches and Windows auto-start use the same per-user configuration file.
• Saving settings creates the config directory when needed, avoiding failures on a fresh profile or first packaged launch.

What's New In 1.0.2

• Microphone denoising is now multithreaded and AVX2-accelerated, cutting post-recording processing of a 2-hour recording from minutes to seconds.
• Denoising splits the audio into per-core segments processed in parallel, with a short warmup overlap so output matches single-threaded processing. It falls back automatically if the optimized path is unavailable.

What's New In 1.0.1

• Added Cancel This Recording below Stop Recording in the tray and floating timer menu.
• Cancelling asks for confirmation, stops the active capture, cleans up temporary files, and saves no output file.

What's New In 1.0

• Independent post-processing switches for normalization/source leveling, speaker echo reduction, microphone denoising, and loopback ducking.
• Smarter Both-mode mixing: microphone echo is reduced first, microphone and system audio are leveled from active audio segments, and loopback audio is ducked while the microphone is active.
• Conservative RNNoise support for microphone denoising, using a 35% wet mix with latency compensation to reduce word clipping.
• Windows package metadata now reports MeetRec version 1.0.0 in the executable.

Features

Recording Sources

• Microphone: record the selected input device.
• System Audio: record loopback audio from the computer.
• Both: record microphone and system audio together, then mix them into one file.

Output Configuration

• Formats: WAV, FLAC, or MP3.
• Quality:
  • Balanced: 16 kHz output, PCM_16 for WAV/FLAC, 64 kbps for MP3.
  • High Quality: 48 kHz output, PCM_24 for WAV/FLAC, 128 kbps for MP3.
• Stereo: keep stereo channels when needed, or leave it off for mono output.
• Preview: the settings window shows the exact output profile, for example WAV / 16 kHz / mono / PCM_16.

Recording Control

• Tray icon: left-click starts or stops recording; right-click opens recording actions, the output folder, settings, or exit.
• Cancel current recording: right-click while recording and choose Cancel This Recording to discard the current take after confirmation.
• Left-click mode: choose Last Used, Microphone, Loopback, or Both.
• Global hotkeys: configure separate hotkeys for microphone, loopback, both, and stop.
• Record hotkeys stop recording: when enabled, pressing any record hotkey again stops the active recording.
• Windows hotkey handling: supports common combinations such as alt+shift+r through a low-level Windows hotkey path.
• Floating recording timer: optional always-on-top timer. Click it while recording to stop; after stopping, it stays briefly in a finished state and clicking it opens the recordings folder.

Automation And Feedback

• Start with Windows: optionally launch MeetRec when Windows starts.
• Auto-stop after silence: Off, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes.
• Tray notifications: enable or disable tray balloon notifications.
• Single instance: launching MeetRec again exits immediately if another instance is already running.

Post-Processing

• Normalize Audio: enabled by default. Performs source leveling before mixing: microphone and system audio are each raised toward a target level using active audio only and a maximum gain cap. This keeps quiet microphone speech intelligible without normalizing long silence or residual noise as the reference.
• Reduce speaker echo (Both mode): enabled by default. Uses system audio as a reference to subtract speaker leakage from the microphone track before denoise, leveling, ducking, and mixing. It only affects Both mode.
• Reduce microphone noise (RNNoise): optional and off by default. Applies conservative RNNoise speech denoising to the microphone track after echo suppression and before leveling, using a 35% wet mix with latency compensation so weak speech is less likely to be removed. Requires rnnoise.dll; if the library is unavailable, recording still succeeds and denoising is skipped.
• Lower system audio while microphone is active: enabled by default. In Both mode, lowers loopback audio while the microphone track is active so local speech stays intelligible. This is side-chain ducking; it does not affect microphone-only or loopback-only recordings.
• Silence trim: optional final post-processing that trims only the start and end silence beyond 5 seconds, applied to the final mixed output rather than the raw sources.
• Copy File to Clipboard: copy the completed recording to the clipboard.
• Delete after Copy (Move to Temp): move the file to the temp folder after copying, keeping the output folder clean.

Usage

1. Start MeetRec.exe.
2. Right-click the tray icon and open Settings.
3. In General, choose startup behavior, whether to show the floating recording timer, and silence auto-stop.
4. In Input Device, select the microphone and refresh devices if needed.
5. In Output Configuration, choose the folder, format, quality, and stereo mode.
6. In Tray Icon Behavior, choose what left-click should record.
7. In Notifications, decide whether tray notifications should be shown.
8. In Post-Processing & Clipboard, decide whether to use source leveling/normalization, echo reduction, microphone noise reduction, loopback ducking, final edge-silence trim, clipboard copy, or delete-after-copy.
9. In Global Hotkeys, set hotkeys and decide whether record hotkeys should stop the active recording.
10. Click Save Settings.

Packaging

Published builds are available from GitHub Releases.

The maintained package is an onedir build:

pyinstaller --noconfirm MeetRec.spec

The output is:

dist\MeetRec\MeetRec.exe

Keep the whole dist\MeetRec folder together. This package layout avoids the extra onefile bootloader process and lets MeetRec run as a single visible MeetRec.exe process.

Development

Requirements

• Python 3.12+
• PyQt6
• soundcard
• soundfile
• numpy
• scipy
• lameenc
• keyboard
• pyinstaller

Install the runtime dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

RNNoise microphone denoising requires rnnoise.dll in the repository root when running from source. Build it from https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise and copy the resulting DLL to rnnoise.dll; MeetRec.spec bundles it into the packaged app's internal runtime directory. If the DLL is missing, MeetRec records normally and skips denoising.

Run tests:

python -m unittest discover -s tests

Build the Windows package:

pyinstaller --noconfirm MeetRec.spec

Acknowledgements

MeetRec started from an open-source Windows tray recording project by lukmay. Thanks to the original author and contributors for the initial foundation.