Record your first meeting

You do not need Call Detection to make a recording. Recording one app yourself is the shortest way to see what Recordstead produces, and it is the same pipeline a detected call goes through.

Record something

Choose Recording ▸ Record App… (⌘R).
Pick the app whose audio you want, give the meeting a title if you like, and start it.

The one-time acknowledgement

The first time, Recordstead asks under the heading Before you record. It says that recording laws vary, and that telling participants and getting any required consent is your job rather than the app's.

Tick I am responsible for recording lawfully and for any required participant notice or consent. and press Continue. Nothing is recorded until this exists, and it is asked once rather than every time.

The macOS prompts

macOS asks for the microphone if it has not already, and for System Audio Recording the first time Recordstead taps an app's audio. Both are covered in Give Recordstead permission to record.

While it runs

The menu bar mark shows that a recording is in progress. Stop it with Stop Recording in the menu bar panel.

A recording you started yourself runs until you stop it, up to four hours. At that point Recordstead stops it by itself and says so; start another one if the meeting is still going.

Afterwards

Processing runs on its own and you can keep working. When it finishes you get a Summary Ready notification, or Transcript Saved when no summary was asked for. Open the main window and go to Meetings to read it.

On a fresh Mac the summary may be skipped the first time, because the summary model is the one thing Recordstead does not fetch automatically. The notification says so and offers to download it.

Result

One meeting in the Meetings list, with its transcript and, depending on how much processing you asked for, its summary.