RecMeets v0.31.0: both tracks stay in step

RecMeets started as a port of Meeting Recorder by Jankees van Woezik, and I keep an eye on what happens there. This week it had two releases. 1.6.0 merged my own pull request #41, the silence gate that adapts to a noisy mic, which RecMeets already had. 1.7.0 brought two changes from other people that RecMeets didn't have, and both were worth it. So v0.31.0 is out, eight days after 0.30.0.

A device that stalls no longer shifts your track

Pull request #35, by Thomas Torggler, fills audio that never came with silence while recording.

RecMeets records two tracks: your mic and what the computer plays. When a device stops sending sound for a moment, say you switch to another device mid-call or a Bluetooth headset changes profile, that time was simply missing from its track. Everything after it then moved earlier against the other track.

Before porting anything, I measured it on RecMeets. A device switch during a 12 second recording gave a track of 10.98 seconds: 1.02 seconds gone, and everything said on that track after the switch came about a second too early against the other one.

RecMeets records differently from the original, so the idea was ported, not the code. Each track now keeps its own clock. When sound arrives 250 ms or more after the last bit, the silence the file is short of goes in first. It's written while the stall happens, and a stall that lasts until Stop is filled at Stop.

After: 11.98 seconds for 12 in three runs (the 20 ms left is the last partial chunk), and a steady 30 second recording comes out at exactly 30.000 seconds.

Actions that run by themselves

Pull request #42, by stbeck11. Actions are your own scripts that run on a finished meeting: send it somewhere, file it, whatever you need. Until now you started them from the menu.

Now auto = true on an action in config.toml runs it every time a transcript is done: after a recording, an import or Transcribe again. They run one after the other, in the order they are in the file. They follow the meeting if you rename it while they run, and they work with Close when done too: the actions finish, then RecMeets quits. At the end you get one line for all of them, like "1 of 2 actions done", with what failed and why.

And a guide topic

If your headset leaks the other side into its own mic, the guide's Troubleshooting now explains PipeWire's echo canceller, with a link to its documentation. I haven't tested it here; the improvement it mentions was measured in the bug report, not by me.

How it was tested

The whole test suite on Linux (276 tests) and on Windows in a VM, the Windows installer and an upgrade over the previous version, and the Linux packages on clean Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora. The stall was tested with virtual PipeWire devices, not with a real Bluetooth headset. I also checked that a late audio callback isn't mistaken for a stall: freezing the recorder twice for 0.6 seconds gave 14.98 seconds for 15, so nothing extra was added.

Thanks to Thomas Torggler and stbeck11 for the two pull requests, and to Jankees for merging mine.

RecMeets isn't out for everyone yet. Everything it does so far is on the RecMeets page.