Audio Retention

Retention Controls

Configure transcript and audio retention in Settings > Output.

The two controls serve different purposes:

• Transcript Retention: How long complete sessions remain in Library. When a session expires, Parrot Scribe deletes its transcript, metadata, comments, speaker assignments, and retained audio.
• Audio Retention: Whether audio remains available while its session exists, with an additional time or storage-size limit that can remove audio earlier.

Retained audio enables Library playback and post-session speaker identification. Changing transcript retention does not enable audio retention, but deleting an expired session also deletes its retained audio.

When you tighten transcript retention, Parrot Scribe calculates the affected files before you select Apply Now.

Encrypted Audio Storage

Retained audio is stored locally in encrypted chunks:

• Retained audio in the app-managed library is stored only in encrypted form.
• Each retained audio chunk is encrypted and authenticated with AES-256-GCM.
• Its key is derived with HKDF-SHA256 from a random per-session secret, a per-file salt, and an audio-domain label. The session secret is AES Key Wrap-protected under a key derived from the Keychain-held root.
• The legacy audio/ retention path asks macOS to exclude its files from Time Machine and iCloud backups. This is best effort and does not cover separately copied session libraries.

Audio exists as plaintext in memory while Parrot Scribe captures, transcribes, or plays it. Exporting or sharing audio can create plaintext WAV data at a destination you choose or temporarily in an owner-only directory; temporary files are removed during normal cleanup.

Key Portability and Recovery

Parrot Scribe marks the root Keychain item as synchronizable. If iCloud Keychain delivers it, another Mac can decrypt post-migration artifacts only when you separately copy the encrypted library with its matching key sidecars.

Parrot Scribe does not sync or upload retained audio. A copied session remains encrypted and requires its session.key sidecar plus the matching root from iCloud Keychain or the 24-word recovery key.

Legacy pre-migration artifacts can still require key material bound to the original Mac.

Deletion

Turning off Retain audio recordings requires typing DELETE and removes retained audio from stored sessions. Transcript data remains subject to the separate transcript retention policy.

Reducing the audio time or size limit applies cleanup using the new limit.

Learn More

• Read Apple Keychain Access for Keychain background.
• Read Encryption Architecture for key separation and encrypted storage details.
• Review Privacy Model for the product-level privacy stance.