Ghosty Notes

No audio in the recording

The most common cause by far is the System audio permission. macOS keeps it in a pane that is not called “audio”, so people grant the microphone, see one green tick, and stop.

  1. Open Settings, General, Permissions in Ghosty Notes.
  2. Look at the System audio row. If it is not granted, select the button on that row. It opens the correct macOS pane, which is Privacy & Security, Screen & System Audio Recording.
  3. Switch Ghosty Notes on there.
  4. Quit Ghosty Notes fully and reopen it. macOS does not apply this permission to an app that is already running.

Full walkthrough on the permissions page.

Other things to check:

  • You can hear yourself but not the other people. That is exactly the System audio permission above. Microphone alone records only you.
  • You can hear them but not yourself. Microphone permission, or the wrong input device selected in macOS Sound settings.
  • Silence from both. Confirm the meeting was playing through your Mac’s speakers or headphones, not through a phone or a separate conference device in the room.

A permission is stuck on denied

macOS only ever asks once. After a refusal, the app cannot ask again; you have to change it in System Settings.

Every row in Settings, General, Permissions has a button that opens the right pane for you. Use it rather than hunting through System Settings.

After changing microphone or system audio, quit and reopen the app.

A model download is stuck

The default transcription model is about 600 MB and downloads in the background while you finish setting up. On a slow connection, your first recording can start before it lands.

  • Check Settings, AI, Transcription. The model shows its download progress there.
  • If progress has stopped, cancel the download and start it again.
  • If it fails repeatedly, you are most likely behind a proxy or a VPN that is blocking the download. Try once on a different network to confirm.

Recording is never lost while a model is still downloading. The audio is captured either way and transcribed when the model is ready.

Context length error in chat

You will see a message saying the input is too long for the model.

This means the meeting you are asking about is bigger than the AI model’s working memory. It is not a bug and your notes are fine.

Three fixes, cheapest first:

  1. Ask a narrower question. “What did we decide about pricing” pulls in far less than “summarise everything”.
  2. Use a model with a larger context window. In LM Studio or Ollama, load a model that advertises a bigger context, then pick it in Settings, AI.
  3. Raise the context length in your local model runner. LM Studio and Ollama both let you set this per model. The default is often far below what the model can handle.

See AI models for notes.

MCP is not connecting

Work through these in order.

1. Are both paths right? They are the single most common cause. Open the file the app generates and copy from it rather than typing:

open "$HOME/Library/Application Support/ghosty-notes/AGENTS.md"

2. Are both paths quoted? Both contain spaces. Unquoted, your agent splits them into the wrong number of arguments and the server never starts.

3. Did this break right after an app update? The binary path contains the app version, so a config saved under an older version points at a folder that no longer exists. Copy the new path from AGENTS.md and update your config.

4. Does the binary exist? Check the path directly:

ls -l "/Applications/Ghosty Notes 0.2.3.app/Contents/MacOS/meeting-mcp"

Substitute your own version number.

5. Did you restart the agent? Cursor and most desktop hosts only read their MCP config at startup.

6. Are there any meetings to find? A working server on an empty vault looks identical to a broken one from the agent’s side. Record something first.

The MCP binary is missing after an update

Same cause as point 3 above, and it deserves its own entry because the symptom is confusing: everything worked yesterday and nothing changed on your side.

The fix is always the same. Open your vault’s AGENTS.md, copy the current binary path, and paste it into your agent’s config in place of the old one.

If you build from source, the bundled binary is not in the app at all. Build it and use target/release/meeting-mcp:

cargo build --release -p meeting-mcp

Still stuck

Email hello@ghostynotes.app. Tell us what you did, what you expected, and what happened instead. Your notes stay on your Mac, so we cannot look at them, which means the detail in your message is all we have to work with.