Turn a recording you already have into a recap

You recorded the session. That was the easy part, and it is also where most people stop, because what you have now is three hours of audio that nobody, including you, is going to sit through again.

Handing it over costs about a minute of your attention. Two things are worth knowing first, because neither is signposted anywhere and both change what you get.

It stops twice and waits for you. A DM who uploads a file and walks away comes back to something that looks stuck and is actually holding a door open.

What comes back is a draft. Nobody at your table sees it until you say so. That is deliberate, and it means you get to read the thing before your players do.

Before you start

You need a recording. It does not have to have been made in MythWeaver. MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG and WEBM all work, up to 500 MB, which is far more than an evening of audio.

You also want your players in the campaign, with their characters attached, before you upload. That is the difference between a recap that uses your party's names and one that guesses at them. More on that at the roster step, which is where it bites.

On the free plan you get one recorded session a month. It does not stop you at the door. It tells you afterwards, on the finished session, in as many words: that was your recorded session for this month, and here is what a paid plan records instead. Worth knowing before you spend it on a test file rather than on a real game.

Getting the write-up

1. Open the campaign, go to Sessions, and press New session. Three ways in.

Upload audio is the one you want. "Record now" starts a live recording that runs from the top bar. "From a summary" is for when you already wrote the recap yourself and just want it in the campaign.

2. Drop the file in, or click to browse, then press Create chapter. It shows the name and the size first, which is the moment to notice you grabbed the wrong file.

One thing that trips people: the list you came from calls this a session, and this panel calls it a chapter. Same thing, right place, carry on.

3. First stop: who was at the table. The upload lands you straight on Confirm Session Roster, and nothing else happens until you answer it. It wants to know who was there and, for each player, which character they were voicing this session, because people swap characters and it will not guess.

Answer this one properly. It is the step that teaches the recap your party's real names. We ran it with the roster left empty and the write-up came back calling Sister Ovanne "Ovan" and Kadar Voss "Cada". It heard the sounds correctly and had nothing to check them against. Invented names are exactly what transcription is worst at, and the roster is the fix.

If you run solo, or you have not invited your players yet, this screen will only show you. That is fine. Press Confirm and Transcribe.

4. Second stop: whose voice is whose. Once it has listened, it comes back with the voices it separated out and asks which player each one is. Anyone it recognised from a previous session is already filled in, so this gets shorter every time. Voices that were not part of play, someone's partner in the next room, get dismissed here.

Both stops offer Skip for now, and both offers are honest. Skipping costs you the per-player detail, not the recap.

5. Leave it alone for a couple of minutes. It transcribes, then reads the whole thing back looking for who turned up, where you went and what happened. Our test recording ran just under three minutes and the whole thing took 76 seconds. A real evening takes proportionally longer, and you do not need to sit and watch it.

How to tell it worked

The session gets a title it wrote itself, and a line telling you what it found: how many moments went on the timeline, how many characters and places, how many scenes. Under that is the recap in three parts, where we left off, a quick summary, and the full narrative. Down the side are the scenes, the cast, the events, the rolls, and the audio with its transcript.

It will say Draft, only you can see this. That is the honest state. Your players have nothing yet.

Read it, then press Publish and send to players. That press is the send. There is no second button afterwards and nothing else to remember.

When it goes wrong

It looks stuck. Nine times in ten it is one of the two stops waiting for an answer. Open the session and see which question is on screen. This is the most common thing that happens by a distance, which is why it is at the top of this list.

The names are wrong. Fantasy names get mangled unless the roster gives it something to match against. Fill the roster in and run it again if you skipped that step, or fix them in the recap with Edit, which saves as you type.

It only heard one voice. Recordings where everyone shares a microphone, or where the audio has been flattened to a single track, give it much less to separate. You still get the recap. What you lose is the per-player detail, so dismiss what it offers and move on rather than fighting it.

Where to go next

If you have not settled how you record in the first place, that is worth sorting before next session rather than after: three ways to get the audio.

And if you have ever wondered why notes taken mid-game come out as unreadable fragments, we wrote about that. This page is the answer to the version of that problem where you gave up and hit record instead.