Transcripts

Moving your data

Between the two Mac editions, to a new Mac, or out of the app entirely.

Your transcripts are already portable

The recordings themselves — the .m4a audio and the Markdown transcripts — live in the library folder you chose, as ordinary files. They are never "in" the app, so they never need migrating: point any copy of Transcripts (or your iPhone and iPad) at the same folder and every recording is there. Moving to a new Mac means moving that folder, or letting iCloud Drive or OneDrive carry it.

What the app itself keeps is smaller: the recordings list (the history behind the menu and the Recordings window) and the remembered voices. Each edition keeps its own copy —

— and that difference is why switching editions used to look like your recordings had vanished. They hadn't; the new edition just had an empty list.

Import, from Settings

In the copy you are moving to: Settings ▸ Sorting ▸ Import from another copy of Transcripts…, and pick the other copy's data folder — the panel opens on the usual place. The recordings list and the remembered voices come over; the transcripts stay where they are.

Importing never replaces anything. A recording already in the list, a voice profile already trained here, stay as they are — so it is safe to run twice, and safe on a copy you have already been using.

Import and export, from the command line

The same migration, scriptable — and the way to hand it to an AI assistant. The app's binary understands two subcommands:


/Applications/Transcripts.app/Contents/MacOS/Transcripts export > state.json


/Applications/Transcripts.app/Contents/MacOS/Transcripts import < state.json

export writes the recordings list and remembered voices to stdout as JSON; import merges such a bundle from stdin, with the same never-replace rules as the Settings button. Quit the app before importing — a running copy would save its own list over the merge.

The two editions pipe together directly:


~/Applications/Transcripts.app/Contents/MacOS/Transcripts export | /Applications/Transcripts.app/Contents/MacOS/Transcripts import

stdin and stdout are the interface on purpose: the store edition is sandboxed, and a file path passed as an argument is a path it cannot open — but a pipe is handed to it already open, so the shell can carry the bundle between editions without either one needing to read the other's files.

What moves, and what doesn't

Moves: the recordings list, and the remembered voices (profiles and samples).

Stays put, by design: the transcripts and audio (your library folder — point the new copy at it), and each edition's settings. The editions genuinely differ — custom scripts and the Handoff pipeline exist only in the direct download — so settings are worth a minute in the new copy rather than a copy of the old file.

An imported recording plays and opens as long as its files are in the library the new copy can see. A recording whose audio only ever lived in the other edition's private captures folder — one that was still processing, or failed — shows in the list but can't be replayed from here.

If you moved by hand and the list came up empty

Older versions had nothing above, and copying history.json into the store edition's container by hand could end with the list still empty — and worse, the file quietly rewritten. Two things changed. The app now reads every record it can rather than none: one record it cannot decode costs that record, not the list. And when that happens, it first preserves the untouched original beside the file as history.json.rejected, so nothing is lost to the rewrite.

If a by-hand move already emptied your list, nothing is actually gone: the other edition still has its history. Run the import above — from Settings or the command line — and the list comes back.