Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt (n.): the ship's gossip — the talk, the news, what everyone's discussing.

A local-first meeting companion that lives in your Obsidian sidebar, inspired by anarlog. Record (or import) a meeting, transcribe it against your local Whisper/vLLM server, auto-summarize it with your local LLM, review the Summary / Transcript / Memo side-by-side, then save one tidy note with a clean title and tags.

Local-first: everything runs against endpoints you configure. No cloud, no accounts.

Why "Scuttlebutt"?

On old sailing ships, the scuttlebutt was the cask of drinking water the crew gathered around — a scuttle (a hole cut in something) tapped into a butt (a large barrel). It was the ship's water cooler, and because sailors swapped news and gossip while drinking there, "scuttlebutt" came to mean the talk, the rumors, the news — what everyone's discussing.

That's exactly what this plugin captures: the scuttlebutt of your meetings, turned into notes you can keep.

What it does

record | import  →  transcribe  →  summarize (+ title + tags)  →  review in sidebar  →  save note

• Record microphone audio (optionally mixing in system audio) right from the sidebar, with a live timer, an in-sidebar audio player, and a status-bar indicator so you can keep working.
• Import an existing audio clip from your vault or upload one from disk.
• Transcribe via any OpenAI-compatible speech endpoint (vLLM Whisper, whisper.cpp server, etc.). Re-transcribe from the Transcript tab any time.
• Summarize via any OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint. Uses anarlog's summary format (h1 sections, 3+ concrete bullets, decisions & action items).
• Context files — pick any vault notes (agenda, prior meetings) to steer the summary.
• Review everything in the sidebar: edit the summary, transcript, memo, title, and tags before saving.
• Save a single note: frontmatter (title, date, tags, participants, audio), the summary, and the transcript/memo tucked into collapsible callouts.

Elegant, anarlog-style output

• Title — the LLM proposes a super-concise topic title (no punctuation clutter).
• Tags — 3–5 specific tags, reusing your existing vault tags where relevant and falling back to a sensible default vocabulary (Product, Engineering, Research, Design, …).
• File name — YYYY-MM-DD — Topic Title.md, so notes sort chronologically and read cleanly.

Install (from source)

npm install
npm run build           # or: node esbuild.js --watch  (watch mode)
bash install.sh ~/path/to/your/vault

Then enable it in Settings → Community plugins → Scuttlebutt, and click the mic ribbon icon to open the sidebar.

Configure

Open Settings → Scuttlebutt. There are two endpoints; each has a URL, API key, Test, and Model dropdown. Click Test to validate the endpoint and load its model list — on success the dropdown fills in, on failure it blanks out.

• Transcription — your Whisper/vLLM server, e.g. http://localhost:8000/v1
• Summary — your LLM/vLLM server, e.g. http://localhost:8001/v1

Other options: input device (see below), spoken/summary language, auto-summarize, title & tag suggestion, output folders, save-audio, and the summary system prompt (with a reset-to-default button).

Development

npm run build     # bundle the plugin to ./main.js
npm test          # run the unit tests (Node's built-in test runner)

The pure logic (file naming, tag/transcript parsing, multipart encoding, …) lives in src/utils.ts and is covered by tests/utils.test.ts. Obsidian- and DOM-dependent code lives in src/main.ts.

Notes on system audio

Scuttlebutt runs as an Obsidian plugin (JavaScript in Electron), so it's limited to the browser's getUserMedia / getDisplayMedia APIs. On macOS those cannot capture system audio the way a native app (like anarlog, which uses Core Audio process taps) can. To record the other side of a call on macOS, install a loopback device such as BlackHole, create an Aggregate Device that includes it, and select that device under Settings → Capture → Input device. When "Capture system audio" yields no track, Scuttlebutt tells you and continues with the microphone.

Notes

• The UI is styled entirely with Obsidian's own theme variables, so it adapts to any light/dark theme.
• Requests go through Obsidian's requestUrl, which avoids browser CORS restrictions when calling local servers.
• Desktop only (recording uses the microphone).

License

MIT © Kar Min