Privacy notice

MeetReplay records audio. Audio is personal data. This notice says exactly what the app touches, where it goes, and how long it is kept, so you can judge it rather than take our word for it.

Last updated: 1 October 2026. MeetReplay was called Rewind until v0.1.76; where this notice names an old file or folder, that is why.

The short version

Everything you record stays on your machine. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts, no cloud. Nothing you record is sent anywhere.

MeetReplay makes exactly one kind of network request: it downloads the speech model, once, from a fixed published address. No audio, no transcript, and no filename is ever part of it. That is the whole of MeetReplay's network use, and it is written down as decision 0017.

The model MeetReplay uses is Base, about 141 MB as your file manager counts it (148 million bytes) - large enough to matter on a metered or slow connection. It is fetched once and kept in %APPDATA%\MeetReplay. The app has no model picker; the only other model it knows, Small (about 465 MB), is used only if somebody names it in settings.json by hand.

Transcription is on by default, so this download happens the first time you save a recording, without being asked for. The app has no switch for it on screen. To turn it off, set "transcribe": false in settings.json (in %APPDATA%\MeetReplay) while MeetReplay is not running; it is honoured from the next launch, and then nothing is downloaded unless you also tick Keep a running transcript.

Nothing about that download describes you or your recording: it is a fixed URL for a fixed file, and the same request every copy of MeetReplay makes.

MeetReplay starts recording by itself

Say this plainly, because it is the part most worth knowing: from the first time you open it, MeetReplay launches when you sign in and begins buffering audio immediately. You do not have to press anything, and nothing asks you first. (Windows lets you overrule this: if you switch MeetReplay off under Startup apps in Settings or Task Manager, it stays off, and MeetReplay cannot turn it back on.) That is what an always-on replay buffer is — one that waited to be told would have missed the moment you wanted to keep — but it does mean a fresh install is recording within seconds of your first login.

It is never hidden while it does this. The tray icon is orange the whole time it is recording, grey when it is stopped, and red if capture has failed; the level meters move with the sound; and saving a recording raises a desktop notification naming the file. There is deliberately no way to make MeetReplay record invisibly.

That last one holds for the archive segments Keep an archive writes by itself too. v0.1.32 briefly made those silent and v0.1.33 put them back: a recorder that writes files nobody is told about is a different product, which is what decision 0006 exists to prevent. The notifications are already as unobtrusive as Windows allows - no sound, short duration - which is the "quieter style" that decision asks for in place of silence.

There is one file that does not raise one, and it is worth naming rather than letting you find it: when Windows itself is shutting down or signing you out, MeetReplay writes whatever was still buffered and then exits. No notification is shown, because the session is ending and there is nowhere left to show it,

• it is added to the Recent recordings list, so it is there when you next

open MeetReplay. It is a normal recording beside the others. Quitting MeetReplay yourself, from the tray, is not this case and does notify.

Two switches on the settings page turn it off, and both take effect at once:

• Start with Windows — stop it launching at login.
• Start recording immediately — launch, but wait to be told to record.

A fresh install also captures your microphone as well as system output, so the very first buffer may contain your voice. Delete the "Me" source - the microphone, called "Mic" before v0.1.77 - if that is not what you want.

What MeetReplay processes

Audio from the sources you configure. Held in a buffer in RAM so you can save the last few minutes after something happens. Two settings change what reaches the disk without your asking each time - Keep an archive and Keep a running transcript, both off by default and both described below. With neither on, only a recording you explicitly save ever reaches the disk. The buffer keeps the rolling window you set — five minutes to six hours — and older audio is continuously overwritten and cannot be recovered.

Saving also empties the part of the buffer it wrote, so the next recording starts where the last one ended rather than repeating it. The audio it held is gone from RAM at that point, and only the file you asked for still has it. If the write fails nothing is dropped, so a failed save never costs you the recording.

One exception, and only while Keep a running transcript is switched on: that feature writes audio to disk.

This is one of two places MeetReplay puts recorded audio on your disk without you asking each time - the other is the archive, below, which you switch on yourself - so it is worth being exact about. Transcribing is slower than recording - on a normal machine, noticeably slower than two people talking at once - so the audio waiting to be transcribed is written into a queue and worked through as fast as the machine can. Without it, whatever could not be transcribed in time was simply lost, which is what made transcripts go blank for hours at a stretch.

What that means in practice:

• It happens only while Keep a running transcript is ticked. Untick it and nothing more is queued. It has never applied to recording on its own.
• What is already waiting stays until it is transcribed or you delete it. Unticking the box, stopping recording or quitting does not empty the queue: the next time the running transcript is on, MeetReplay works through what was left and deletes each piece as before. If you are switching the feature off for good, delete the queue folder yourself.
• Each piece is deleted the moment it has been transcribed, usually within a minute or two, and within a few hours at worst on a slow machine.
• The queue is capped at six hours of audio. Past that the oldest is deleted untranscribed, and MeetReplay says so rather than doing it quietly.
• It lives in a queue folder inside your transcripts folder, so you can see exactly what is waiting and delete it yourself whenever you like.
• Silence is never queued, so a quiet room costs nothing.
• It never leaves your machine, like everything else here.

If you would rather no audio were ever written without you asking, turn Keep a running transcript off. Recording, saving and the buffer are unaffected by it.

Keep an archive

Off by default, and it changes the sentence above. With it on, MeetReplay keeps a compressed copy of everything it records, writes it to disk a buffer's length at a time and once more when you quit, and deletes each day once it is older than the number of days you choose - 30 unless you change it, from 1 to 365, on the Buffer tab right under the switch.

What that means in practice:

• Where: %LOCALAPPDATA%\MeetReplay\Archive, one folder a day, one .opus file per source - not in your recordings folder. AppData\Local is not synced by OneDrive's folder backup, which Documents often is.
• How much: speech quality, 16 kbps a source - about 7 MB an hour each. The Buffer tab shows a day's worth for your sources and the most the archive can ever hold, which is that times the days you keep.
• What it holds: audio, and the blurred screenshots described below.
• What is deleted: only the archive's own day folders, and only once they are older than your setting. It checks when MeetReplay starts and after every file it writes. Anything else in that folder is left alone.
• What is never deleted: recordings you save with the shortcut or the Save button. Those are full quality, in your recordings folder, and stay until you delete them, archive or not.
• Switching it off throws away what was waiting to be written and stops adding to it. What is already in the archive stays until its days run out, or until you delete the folder yourself.
• Stopping recording loses whatever had not been written yet; quitting writes it.

With blurred screenshots - on unless you untick it, and only ever while the archive is on. MeetReplay also keeps small pictures of your screen in the archive: every monitor, shrunk to 480 pixels across and blurred so heavily that no text on it can be read - checked on a real screen, where even a lock-screen clock became two smudges. One is kept when the screen changes and one every five minutes otherwise, as a JPEG of about 10 KB beside that day's audio, and it goes when the day's archive goes. They show you what was on screen when something was said; nothing is read out of them, nothing is searched in them, and like everything else they never leave your PC. They still show the shape of what was there - which window, a shared screen, a face in a video call - so untick With blurred screenshots under the archive switch if you do not want even that.

Nothing else changes: the tray icon, the meters and a notification for every file it writes all behave exactly as they do otherwise - each archive notification also says how many screenshots it kept since the last one. Recording never becomes less visible than it already is.

(Before v0.1.77 this option was called Save automatically and wrote full-quality recordings into your recordings folder, never deleting them. Those files are still where they were, and the archive does not touch them.)

Saved recordings. A save writes several files that belong together, in a folder of their own named meetreplay-<timestamp>, and each file's name begins the same way:

• meetreplay-*.mkv - the clock picture and a track holding all sources mixed together, which is what a player uses when you press play.
• meetreplay-*.<source>.opus - one file per source, holding that source alone. These are the individual recordings, in a format any audio editor opens.
• meetreplay-*.srt sidecars - transcripts, when transcription is on, plus a .clock.srt timeline written on every save.

(Recordings saved before the rename begin rewind- rather than meetreplay-. Those saved before v0.1.70 sit loose in the recordings folder rather than in a folder each. Older ones still, and rewind-*.mka from before the clock became a picture, are single files with every source as a track inside.)

That mix is worth knowing about before you share a recording: the .mkv contains every source, so deleting a source's .opus file does not remove that source from it, and neither does muting a track in a player. To share one source, share that source's .opus and not the .mkv. This is easier to get right than it used to be - each source is already a separate file - but it is also easier to get wrong in the other direction, because the .mkv is the file that looks like "the recording".

They are written to the folder you chose — by default Documents\MeetReplay, which you can change on the settings page. If you used the app before it was renamed and never chose a folder, it goes on saving to Documents\Rewind, where your recordings already are, and the settings page shows that folder as your choice. They stay until you delete them; MeetReplay never deletes them and never uploads them.

Your settings (settings.json). Buffer length, quality, sources, hotkey, output folder, and a list of your ten most recently saved recordings - for each, its path, the date and time you saved it, and how long it runs. That list is what the main screen shows, and it is worth naming plainly: ten paths with timestamps say more about when you were recording than a single path did. Deleting settings.json clears it; deleting a recording does not, so a row can outlive its file. For the package - the only build published since v0.1.46 - it is in %APPDATA%\MeetReplay. (Before the rename it was %APPDATA%\Rewind; the first launch after upgrading moves that folder, the speech model and the log with it, so nothing is left under the old name.) A copy run from a folder you unpacked yourself keeps it beside the executable instead, which is what a build from source does; which one applies depends on how MeetReplay was installed, never on how it was launched. It stays until you delete it, and contains no credentials.

Device and process names. Used to list your audio devices and to capture a named application. Held in RAM, and the ones you pick are written to settings.json.

A set-aside settings file (settings.json.broken), only if your settings file ever fails to load - a hand edit that leaves invalid JSON, or a truncated write. MeetReplay keeps the old file under that name instead of overwriting it, so a typo costs the typo rather than every source you had configured. It holds exactly what settings.json holds, the list of recent recordings included, and it stays until you delete it.

A diagnostic log (meetreplay.log, and meetreplay.log.old once it has filled), in the same folder as settings.json. It exists so that a crash or a failure can be explained afterwards, and it never leaves your machine - nothing sends it anywhere, and it reaches us only if you choose to send it. It records the version, when MeetReplay started, problems and errors as they happen, the graphics adapter used to draw the window, and the work of the transcription catch-up: the names of your recordings, the names of your sources and the folders they are in, so like the recent-recordings list it says when you were recording. It holds no audio and no transcript text. It is bounded: at 256 KB it becomes meetreplay.log.old and a new one starts, so the two together never pass half a megabyte. Delete either at any time.

That is the complete list. There is no identifier, no usage counter, and no profile of any kind.

What MeetReplay does not do

• No network connection other than downloading the speech model, and only while transcription is on - which it is by default, see above.
• No telemetry, analytics, crash reports, or update checks.
• No account, sign-in, or licence check.
• No audio, transcript or filename ever leaves your machine, including while transcribing. Speech recognition runs entirely on your computer, using a model file on your disk.
• No content analysis beyond the transcript you asked for. MeetReplay does not summarise what you recorded, and builds no index of it: the Search tab reads your transcript files when you open it and looks through them on your PC, and keeps nothing of what you searched for.
• No background recording while it appears stopped. See below.

Transcripts of saved recordings

On by default (see the top of this notice for how to turn it off). Worth reading, because it changes what is on your disk rather than what leaves it:

• MeetReplay writes .srt transcripts beside each recording, in its folder — one per source, plus a combined one. A transcript is a searchable text record of what people said, which is easier to skim, copy and quote than the audio, so treat it as at least as sensitive as the recording. Deleting the .mkv alone does not delete its transcripts; deleting the recording's folder does.
• The speech model is downloaded once to %APPDATA%\MeetReplay and checked against a published SHA-256 before it is used.
• It runs when you save a recording, not continuously. The separate setting below is the one that runs continuously.

If you turn on a running transcript

Off by default, and it changes the same sentence Keep an archive does. With Keep a running transcript ticked, MeetReplay transcribes what is being said about once a minute while it is recording and appends it to a text file - one file per day, in Documents\MeetReplay\Transcripts unless you choose another folder on the settings page. If v0.1.70 renamed that folder to _transcripts on your machine, MeetReplay moves it back on the next launch and says so in meetreplay.log; if the move cannot be done, your transcripts are left exactly where they are and it says that too.

• What it keeps is words. The audio waits in the queue described above only until it has been transcribed, and then it is deleted; the day file holds only text. That is less on your disk than a recording - and, in the way that matters here, something more exposing: a searchable, greppable, quotable record of everything said near the machine, with a wall-clock time and the source's name on every line. It is easier to read a year of these than to listen to an hour of audio.
• It runs only while recording is running, because it takes its audio from the recording. Stopping stops it. Unticking the box stops it without stopping the recording.
• Nothing deletes these files - not MeetReplay, not time, not uninstalling. The folder grows for as long as you leave the setting on. Managing it is yours: it is a folder of text files, and your file manager already shows its size and already deletes.
• It needs the speech model, so the note above about the download applies to this too.

Recording other people

This is the part that deserves your attention. MeetReplay captures whatever your system plays, which can include other people's voices — a call, a meeting, a stream. Laws on recording other participants differ by country and by US state, and many require that everyone knows, or consents.

MeetReplay is deliberately built so recording is never hidden:

• The tray icon is orange while recording, grey when stopped, and red if capture has failed, so it can never silently look idle while running.
• Saving a recording always raises a desktop notification, even when the window is closed - the one exception being the save made as Windows itself shuts down, described above.
• Live level meters show which sources are actually capturing.

We will not add a hidden or silent recording mode. If you use MeetReplay around other people, tell them.

Your data, your control

Because nothing leaves your machine, there is no data of yours for us to hold, export, or delete — the usual data-subject rights have nothing to act on at our end. In practical terms:

• Delete recordings: delete the recording's folder, meetreplay-<timestamp> (or rewind-<timestamp> for one saved before the rename), not just the .mkv inside it. A save is a group - the .mkv, one .opus per source, and the .srt sidecars - and the .opus files hold each source's audio on its own, so deleting only the .mkv removes the mix and leaves the individual recordings behind. (A recording saved before v0.1.70 has no folder: delete every file beginning with its name, which rewind-<timestamp>.* selects. Older single-file recordings are just the one .mka or .mkv.)
• Delete settings and the log: delete settings.json, meetreplay.log and meetreplay.log.old, and settings.json.broken if one is there, all in %APPDATA%\MeetReplay. (A copy you built or unpacked yourself keeps them beside MeetReplay.exe instead, under the same names.)
• Clear the buffer: stop recording, or quit. The buffer is RAM-only and does not survive. Saving a recording also clears the part it wrote, and shortening the buffer length discards whatever no longer fits, both while recording continues.
• Remove autostart: untick Start with Windows, or switch MeetReplay off under Startup apps in Windows Settings. It is part of the installed package, so uninstalling removes it too. (A copy you built or unpacked yourself uses a MeetReplay value under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run instead; untick the box before deleting such a copy's folder, or the value is left pointing at an executable that is no longer there.)

Uninstalling leaves behind the recordings you saved, their transcripts, your running transcript's day files if you kept one, any audio still waiting in its queue folder, the archive in %LOCALAPPDATA%\MeetReplay\Archive if you kept one, your settings and log in %APPDATA%\MeetReplay, and the speech model - ggml-base.bin, 141 MB, in that same folder. The uninstaller does not remove the recordings, transcripts, queue, archive or settings because they are yours; delete them as described above if you want them gone.

The model is a different case and worth being plain about, because it is by far the largest thing that stays: it is left so that reinstalling or upgrading does not download it again. It contains nothing about you - it is the same published file everybody downloads - and deleting it is safe at any time. MeetReplay fetches it again the next time it needs it. Measured after an uninstall: 141.1 MB remains, and all but 0.1 MB of that is this one file.

A caution about the recordings themselves

Once you save a recording, it is an ordinary file: it is as private as wherever you put it. If your output folder is inside a synced folder (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive), your recordings will be uploaded by that software. MeetReplay cannot know or prevent this — choose the output folder deliberately.

This includes the default. MeetReplay saves to Documents\MeetReplay and writes the running transcript to Documents\MeetReplay\Transcripts, and on many Windows PCs Documents itself is backed up to OneDrive - Windows offers to switch that on during setup, and it is easy to have said yes. If it is on, your recordings, transcripts and the transcript queue are uploaded to your OneDrive. MeetReplay checks this every time it starts - whether your recordings, transcript or archive folder is inside OneDrive - says so on screen when one is, and writes the answer to its log either way. To check yourself, open File Explorer: a cloud or tick icon beside the Documents folder means it is synced. Choose a folder outside it on the settings page if you do not want that. (The check knows OneDrive's own folders; other sync clients, such as Dropbox, are not detected.)

Contact

Questions about this notice, or a privacy concern, go through the reporting route in SECURITY.md.