Guided walkthrough

Getting Oris is a download, a drag into your Applications folder, and a double-click. There’s no terminal step and no second installer to go and find. The app opens into a guided walkthrough the first time you launch it and handles the rest from there, including putting the plugin into Obsidian for you if that’s where your notes live. Instead of a wall of settings, setup is a short tour:

1. Pick a destination. First the tour asks where your meeting notes should land, offering three cards: Obsidian vault (record from the Obsidian plugin), Markdown folder (any folder — no Obsidian needed), or Apple Notes (straight into Notes on this Mac). Choose the vault and Oris reads Obsidian’s registry and, when the answer is unambiguous (exactly one vault installed, or exactly one currently open), fills it in automatically; only when several vaults are present and none is clearly active does it ask you to pick from the detected list or browse to the folder. Choose a Markdown folder and any writable folder will do — no .obsidian directory required — plus a choice of how notes are named or appended. Choose Apple Notes and the tour explains the one permission macOS needs, asks for it, then lists your Notes accounts and folders to pick from. A line under the cards is honest about the limits: Notion is planned. See Obsidian and Markdown for the full picture. Continue stays disabled until the card you’ve selected is actually finished (a vault picked, a folder chosen, or Apple Notes set up through its permission-and-folder flow), so you can’t step past a destination that couldn’t deliver. If you already had Oris set up, this step says so and Continue is ready immediately; pick a different card and the same rule applies until that card’s setup is done.

2. Install the Obsidian plugin. Only when your destination is an Obsidian vault — pick a Markdown folder or Apple Notes and the tour skips this step entirely, since there’s no vault for a plugin to live in. When it does run, one step puts the recording controls inside Obsidian; the tour waits until Obsidian confirms the plugin is up, with live hints if anything needs a manual toggle. If Obsidian starts in Restricted Mode (which blocks community plugins by default), the tour surfaces the exact toggle to turn it on (Settings → Community plugins → Turn on community plugins) and waits for you to enable Oris.

3. Grant permissions. macOS asks twice here, once for the microphone and once for system audio, because Oris captures both sides of your calls. (An Apple Notes destination needs one more, for permission to control Notes, but that one is asked for back in step 1 where you chose it, not here.) The tour runs a test capture (~8 seconds, plays a chime so the system-audio track has something to hear) and checks both tracks. Missing or denied microphone access and a missing system-audio authorization are hard blocks, since those are required for recording to work. If the system-audio track was authorized but captured only silence during the test (sometimes happens with unusual audio routing), the tour shows a warning and lets you continue anyway; your microphone still records, so you can try a real recording and see whether the other side comes through. A quieter prompt follows, asking for permission to post notifications, which is how Oris tells you a recording finished and your notes landed. If notifications were already turned off for Oris (an earlier install, or a prompt dismissed before you got here), macOS will not ask again, so instead of failing silently the tour says so and offers a direct link to System Settings → Notifications plus a Re-check button once you have flipped it on. Recording works either way, so you can continue anyway; you just won’t see the “Notes inserted” banner.

4. Models prepare while you wait. Recordings are transcribed entirely on your Mac, so the first launch downloads and optimizes the on-device models in the background. A progress strip at the bottom of the step shows a percentage for each model as it downloads, then switches to an explicit Compiling for the Neural Engine label once the download finishes, so a bar sitting at 99% reads as “still working,” not stuck. When it’s done, the strip reports how long each phase took. Meanwhile the tour shows a sample note (summary, action items, decisions, open questions, and the speaker-labeled transcript) so you know exactly what you’ll get before you’ve recorded a thing. (Summaries can also use a cloud provider you configure; the audio itself is never sent to it.)

5. Record your first note. A three-line instruction plus an optional ~20-second read-aloud script, so your first real note lands while the tour is still open to celebrate it. The Back button is on the left; Finish is on the right.

Picking up where you left off. If you relaunch (or re-run) the tour after some steps are already done (destination chosen, plugin loaded, models downloaded), it doesn’t blink past them. A brief summary screen checkmarks everything that’s already set and points at the one step that still needs you, then lands there. The progress dots along the top turn into checkmarks as each step completes, and a Back button lets you step back through finished steps to review or change them without the tour pulling you forward again.

Re-learn the tour anytime. Oris menu → Reset Walkthrough restarts it from the top. Your settings, destination, downloaded models, and permission grants are untouched; it only forgets that you’ve seen the tour.

The home window. Once the walkthrough is done, launching the app takes you to its home window, which is where every setting lives from then on. See Settings for the tab-by-tab tour. The Obsidian plugin carries no provider or model settings of its own, so you configure all of it here.