A meeting notetaker that treats your disk as the database

What it does

Anarlog is a desktop meeting notetaker that records audio, transcribes it locally, and distills the conversation into a markdown file on your computer. It hands the AI summarization off to whatever LLM you already use—OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint—but keeps the audio and the resulting notes from ever touching a cloud backend. There are no accounts, no telemetry, and no hosted infrastructure; your filesystem is the entire product.

The interesting bit

The project’s architectural stubbornness is its best feature. By treating plain markdown as the native data format and the disk as the database, anarlog sidesteps the usual SaaS trap where your notes are held hostage in someone else’s app. The maintainers lean into this by licensing it under MIT and explicitly encouraging you to fork it, sell it, or self-host it.

Key highlights

• Transcription runs entirely on-device, so your audio never leaves the machine.
• Every meeting is a .md file you can open in any editor, sync through Dropbox, iCloud, Syncthing, or git, or track in version control.
• Bring-your-own-LLM support covers OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama, LM Studio, and anything else OpenAI-compatible.
• No accounts, no tracking, and no cloud backend to maintain.
• MIT-licensed and explicitly positioned as forkable and self-hostable.

Caveats

• The core team is now building char, a separate commercial app. Anarlog is not retired and remains open-source, but its future development pace likely depends on community contributions rather than full-time stewardship.

Verdict

Worth a look if you want AI-generated meeting notes without surrendering your data to a hosted platform. Look elsewhere if you need native mobile apps, real-time team collaboration, or a managed enterprise backend.