Guides
Recording a lecture
What happens before, during and after a lecture, and what you can control.
Start a recording
From your calendar
Stenny reads your calendars and asks for access once. From ten minutes before a lecture until it ends, the menu offers Start Data Analytics at the top. Ten minutes before the lecture starts, a notification asks Record this lecture? with a Start Recording button. Close the notification for “not now”. Stenny never starts by itself.
If the notification shows as a banner, the button only appears when you point at it. To keep it visible, set Stenny's Alert Style to Persistent in System Settings → Notifications.
How events match courses
An event belongs to a course if its title contains the course name, an alias of three or more letters, or one of the course's calendar words in the settings. Numbers must match, so “Data Processing II” isn't “Data Processing I”. Events shorter than 20 minutes, like assignment deadlines, are ignored. To check a title:
stenny match-course "VL Data Analytics"
By hand
Open the menu bar and choose Start Lecture, then the course.
During the lecture
The menu bar icon turns into a red dot with the running time. The live draft appears in Obsidian about 7 to 16 seconds after the words were said.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| ⌘ ⇧ Ü | Pauses and resumes from any app. While paused, the microphone is off and nothing is recorded. The transcript marks the pause, and timestamps keep following the lecture clock. This is the default shortcut; you can choose your own with pause_shortcut in config.toml. Ü is the key right of P on German keyboards. On other keyboards, pick another shortcut such as ⌃ ⌥ P. |
| Open Transcript in Obsidian | Jumps to the live draft. |
| Microphone ▸ | Switches the microphone, even during a recording. See Microphones. |
| Live Transcript While Recording | Untick it to only record. This saves battery, and the transcript is made after the lecture. |
Keep the lid open. With the lid closed on battery, macOS sleeps and nothing is recorded. Stenny keeps the Mac awake while it records, but the display may turn off.
After the lecture
Choose Stop & Make Final Transcript. Whisper goes over the whole recording again, and the clean transcript replaces the live draft.
- Plugged in: the final pass starts right away at low priority. A three-hour lecture takes about 20 to 25 minutes on a MacBook Air M4.
- On battery: the final pass waits in the queue. It runs the next time you stop a lecture on power, with
stenny queue run, or automatically if you installed the schedule.
The live draft is fast but rough. Only the final transcript is meant for studying.
Talks and events
To record something that isn't a course, like a guest talk, choose Start Lecture ▸ Talk or Event… Stenny suggests the title of a calendar event that's on now, and you can change it.
A talk gets its own folder next to your lectures, and its language is detected per recording among English, German and French. Talks have no glossary, course files, lecture numbers or topic links.
Record from the terminal
Everything the menu bar app does also works from the terminal:
stenny live --course da stenny pause stenny resume stenny stop
To rehearse with a recording instead of the microphone, add --file test.m4a --speed 3.