Recording

Recording is how spoken words get into dembrane. Someone talks; dembrane captures the audio, uploads it safely in the background, and hands it to transcription. It’s built for real rooms - patchy wifi, a phone that locks itself, a backgrounded tab - without losing what people said.

Recording counts towards your workspace’s metered hours. The Free tier includes 1 hour; every paid tier is unlimited (see tiers & billing).

Two ways to collect#

Most recording is done by participants, with no account and nothing to install:

• A QR code - generated for you in the portal editor. Print it, project it, or stick it on a table; a phone camera opens the portal.
• A direct link - copy and share the portal link by email, on a slide, or in a chat.

Both open the participant portal, which walks people through onboarding, consent, a mic check, and recording.

You can also record yourself. From the dashboard you get the same recorder participants use, with the same pause, resume and stop controls - useful when you’re the one in the room. dembrane Go, the native iOS app, is the most robust option when connectivity is shaky: it records to the device first and uploads when it can, so a dead spot never costs you the conversation.

The mic check#

Before recording, the portal offers a mic check so a participant can confirm the right microphone is picked up and the level looks healthy - the quickest way to avoid recording five minutes of silence. During recording, a live level meter (waveform) shows that audio is actually coming through.

When the transcript appears#

The conversation shows up in your dashboard as soon as it starts. The transcript appears about 30 seconds to a minute after the start. The wait is normal: audio is sent in 30-second pieces, and the higher-quality transcription takes a little extra processing time. After that it keeps growing as people speak.

Pause, resume, stop#

• Pause / resume - step away mid-session without ending the recording. What’s recorded so far is safe; resuming continues the same conversation.
• Stop - end the recording. The final pieces finish uploading and transcription and summarising take over.

Audio is uploaded in small pieces as it’s spoken rather than as one big file at the end, so an interruption only ever costs the current piece - and a weak connection retries one small piece instead of resending everything. A participant’s name and email are collected only if you asked for them in the portal editor, and transcripts can be anonymised. How dembrane keeps it is covered in data ownership & compliance.

Related#

• Transcription - what happens to the audio once it’s uploaded.
• The participant portal - the no-account recording experience, end to end.
• dembrane Go (mobile) - the native iOS recorder.
• Tiers & billing - recording hours and what’s metered.