Library Recovery
Murmur saves every recording's audio to disk the moment it is captured, separately from the History database. If History ever shows up empty or incomplete — after a failed migration, a corrupted database, or restoring files from a backup — the audio is almost certainly still there, and the library can be rebuilt from it.
Before you start
Confirm the audio exists. The recovery tool shows you what is on disk before doing anything: a count of audio files and meetings found. If those counts look right, recovery will work.
Running recovery
- Open Settings > Developer.
- Click Rebuild Library From Audio Files.
- Review the on-disk counts, then click Start Recovery.
For each audio file found, Murmur creates a History entry that points at the existing file. Recovery is non-destructive: it never moves or modifies audio files, and recordings already present in your library are skipped — running it twice causes no duplicates.
While it runs you'll see a progress bar ("Reconstructing library…") with an X-of-Y count. Keep Murmur open until it finishes; minimizing is fine.
Reading the results
The completion summary shows:
- Recordings reconstructed and meetings reconstructed — entries created
- Already in library (skipped) — files that needed nothing
- Errors (non-fatal) — individual files that could not be read; everything else still recovered
If recovery fails outright, your audio files are unaffected — the error message and Console.app logs explain what went wrong, and it is safe to try again.
Step 2: restore the text
Recovered entries have their transcription text blank — recovery restores the recordings, not the words. To fill the text back in:
- Stay in Settings > Developer.
- Run Re-transcribe Pending Recordings, which processes every blank recording through your active model.
See Re-transcription for how the batch works, including stopping and resuming.
Prevention: the audio-first design is intentional — audio is written progressively during recording, so even a crash mid-dictation leaves a playable file that recovery can find. There is nothing you need to back up beyond your normal Mac backup.