Changelog: Trace

Trace 2.17 introduces recording compression to save disk space and an overhauled Ask, resulting in better, more suitable responses to your questions.

Ask has been rebuilt to work through your library the way a person would, looking things up and opening what it needs before it answers, rather than answering from a single search. We have also added a way to throw away a recording you did not mean to keep, from wherever you happen to be when you realise. There are also a couple of dozen smaller fixes. As always, thanks for using Trace.

Trace 2.16 rebuilds the whole browsing side of the app. The complaint we kept hearing, and felt ourselves, was that Trace got messier the more you used it. The window opened on whichever recording you made last and every recording sat in one flat list, which is fine at ten recordings and hopeless at two hundred. There is now a home screen that opens on today, folders to file recordings into, a rebuilt reader, and one Ask that can look at everything, one folder, or one recording.

Search has been rebuilt underneath it too. Results are ranked by how well they match rather than by date, and with AI features on it finds meetings by meaning, so you can search for a topic in your own words. Alongside that, you can now choose what Trace does when a transcript is ready, from asking for a name to a quiet notice to nothing at all, and Trace no longer touches your clipboard unless you ask it to. As always, thanks for using Trace.

Trace 2.15 has a brand new echo-cancellation engine, so if you record on speakers you should notice a real difference in transcription quality.

We have also reworked tagging, so tags are suggested for you to accept rather than applied quietly in the background, and the Summary tab no longer starts writing a summary the moment you select it. Alongside those there are a handful of smaller improvements, including keyboard shortcuts that no longer prevent other apps using them while you are not recording.

Trace 2.14 is a smaller release. The main change is that you can now choose where Trace keeps your recordings, instead of having them locked away in the app's own storage. Point it at Documents, an external disk, or a folder your sync tool already watches. It will offer to migrate your existing sessions automatically.

The pill no longer takes your keyboard while you're typing somewhere else, and you can now stop Trace copying summaries to your clipboard automatically at the end of sessions.

Trace 2.12 contains a single quality of life improvement. The pill has always sat at the bottom of your screen, which is fine right up until it covers something you need to see. You can now drag it around and put it wherever suits you.

While you drag, faint guides show where the pill normally sits, and it snaps back onto them if you drop it close. Trace remembers the spot for each display, so reconnecting a monitor puts the pill back where you left it on that screen. There is a reset in Settings if you want it back in the middle.

Move the pill where you want it

Drag the pill anywhere on the screen. Dashed guides show where it normally sits, and it snaps back if you drop it close to them. Trace remembers the spot for each display.

Trace 2.10 is mostly about the Live Recap, the running transcript that appears while you are still in the meeting. We have moved it onto a much more capable speech model, so what you read during a call is far closer to what was actually said, and you can now scroll back through the conversation without it pulling you to the bottom every time somebody speaks.

There are a few other things in here too. You can hide the progress pill while a long transcription finishes, browsers finally show their real name in the audio source picker, and the command line tool can tell your own scripts the moment a meeting is ready. As always, thanks for using Trace.

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Trace 2.8 is mostly about giving you more control over the AI features. You can now point Trace at any OpenAI-compatible server, like LM Studio or Ollama, so summaries, naming, tags and Ask run through a model you choose, and everything the AI writes now comes out in the language the meeting was in. We've also taught Trace to separate speakers in in-person meetings, which used to come out as one long monologue.

Beyond that it's quality-of-life. You can pause a transcription when you need your Mac's power back, copy a summary a section at a time, and Cmd-Q now checks before it quits the app. Here's a more in-depth look at what's changed.

Trace 2.7 is our biggest update so far. We’ve made a few big changes to how Trace starts and stops recordings, and it can now automatically detect when you’re entering and leaving a call, so you don’t forget to start or stop it. We’ve also overhauled the echo cancellation algorithm to be much more effective, and added the ability to chat with your existing transcripts and summaries if you’ve got Trace’s AI features turned on.

We’ve introduced a whole new suite of tools for exporting your data from Trace into other apps like Obsidian, a new way to organise your sessions with tags, and quite a few other quality-of-life fixes. Behind these headline features there are around sixty smaller improvements and fixes. Here’s a more in-depth look at what’s changed. As always, thanks for using Trace.

Auto-copy is now optional

When a transcription finishes, Trace copies the result straight to your clipboard by default. You can now switch that off in Settings, so a finished recording leaves your clipboard alone until you copy it yourself.

Trace 2.0 is a big one. Before this, Trace lived entirely in your menu bar and everything it recorded went out through the clipboard. Now it has a proper home. The History window keeps every recording in one place, plays them back with the transcript following along, and lets you search across all of them.

Most of the release is that window and the speaker tools inside it, so you can fix who said what inline and let Trace suggest names for voices it recognises from earlier meetings.