Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcription, overhauled from HN feedback

Trace, a Mac app that records and transcribes meetings entirely on-device, has shipped a major update and relaunched on Hacker News, per a Show HN post by the developer on August 25, 2026. The update follows an original launch posted a couple of months prior and incorporates feedback gathered from that first thread.

The new version, detailed in the Trace changelog, adds roughly a dozen capabilities that were absent from the initial release. A persistent History window replaces the previous clipboard-only output, letting users search, replay, edit, and export every transcript in one place. The app is now meeting-aware: it detects when another app activates the microphone and prompts the user to start recording, and can be configured to do so automatically on a per-app basis. It also offers to stop recording once the microphone is released — a fix the developer says was the most common request from the original thread.

Other additions include an in-person mode that splits a room conversation by speaker, persistent speaker memory that suggests names for recognized voices across separate calls, screenshot capture with on-device OCR (making screen content searchable alongside the transcript), and on-device meeting summaries generated by a local model (Qwen by default, with support for swapping in other OpenAI-compatible endpoints). A pre-call briefing feature surfaces notes from previous meetings with the same participants. The app also now detects meeting language and supports real-time translation in the live recap, handles non-English languages better than before, and can import and transcribe external audio and video files.

A companion command-line tool, tracecli, ships with the update. The developer notes in the HN post that tracecli transcript --live --follow streams a live transcript during an active meeting, which they use personally to pipe audio to a local LLM in real time.

On the reliability side, audio is now written to disk continuously during recording so a mid-meeting crash cannot corrupt the file, and the echo cancellation algorithm has been rewritten. A direct download is also available for users who prefer not to use the App Store.

The developer cites Hacker News feedback that Trace was underpriced as the reason for a licensing change. The app retains a one-time, lifetime licence with no upgrade fees, but the price now starts at £29 for a single Mac, with multi-Mac tiers available. A 7-day free trial is included. The developer positions Trace as a "minimal, out-of-the-way alternative to MacWhisper" — the only named competitor in the post.