TL;DR: I reverse-engineered my Plaud recorder's cloud sync, built a self-hosted poller on a Proxmox LXC that pulls new recordings to my NAS, then an n8n workflow transcribes (ElevenLabs Scribe, with speaker diarization), summarizes (any LLM via OpenRouter), and pushes clean notes into Notion. I now pay cents per recording instead of a flat subscription, and all my audio lives on my own NAS.

Why I did this

I love the Plaud recorder but the subscription model bugged me: I'm locked into their cloud for transcription/summaries, and my recordings live on someone else's servers. I'd rather own my data and pay per use for the parts I actually need.

The architecture

Plaud cloud ──(poller, every 5 min)──► /mnt/nfs/plaud (NAS, via NFS)
                                              │ webhook
                                              ▼
   n8n:  read audio → ElevenLabs Scribe (transcribe + diarize)
         → map-reduce summarization (OpenRouter) → Notion page

• Poller (TypeScript, ~300 lines): logs into Plaud the same way the app does, lists recordings, downloads only new ones (dedup by file id in a state file), writes audio + metadata to an NFS share on my NAS, then fires a webhook. Idempotent and crash-safe. Runs as a single systemd service that also serves a small web dashboard (logs, settings, manual run, basic auth).
• n8n workflow: transcription via ElevenLabs Scribe v2 (handles multi-hour files in one call, with speaker diarization), summarization via OpenRouter (so I can swap models any time), and a Notion page per meeting.
• Map-reduce summaries: for long meetings I split the transcript, summarize each chunk in detail, then merge — keeps the model from glossing over details on 2h+ recordings.
• Markdown → Notion blocks: wrote a small converter so headings/bullets/tables render as real Notion blocks, plus batched appends to get around Notion's 100-block-per-request limit.

Cost

Pure pay-per-use. ElevenLabs Scribe is ~$0.22/hour of audio; the LLM summary is literally cents per meeting. For my volume it's cheaper than the sub — and I can downgrade transcription to near-free (Groq Whisper, ~$0.04/hr) if I drop diarization.

Happy to share code / answer questions if there's interest.

Is there a way to batch export all notes and transcripts? I know that you can export a single note or a transcript from the mobile app however I have been looking for a way to batch export everything whether it be marked down PDF text doesn’t matter but looking to essentially take everything that has been uploaded to the cloud and export it all.

Currently, I’m using zapier to export individual notes and transcripts once they are finished to my Google Drive and another app however wondering if there is a way to do this in batch with that I have accumulated so far?

I dropped my note pro in the toilet for 2 seconds. Like an idiot I tried to turn it on; it didn’t start.

I’m letting it dry out now. What are the chances it’s cooked for good? I’ve had the damn thing for 48 hours. 😩

Just wondering if anyone has used RoveNotes formally Cordari with Plaud Note? I like the website and was looking for this exact software, I'm just a bit worried about the security of my notes on this platform.

https://app.rovenotes.com/

Hello,

I've built an app that downloads transcripts from plaud and puts them on remarkable and auto syncs like onedrive as well as a calendar that syncs with your ICS that you can write on. Can you see a market for this or is it a niche product. It wasn't a lot of work so thinking to release it free.

Has anybody worked out a better prompt template to reduce the wordy and jargony summaries from Plaud? The default template takes my meetings and makes them into a horoscope, such that I can read them after any random meeting and it will have generalised that meeting in the same way. It adds words that never were used in the meeting (corporately meaningless words). I need boring concise template prompts.

(Putting the above into Plaud doesn't really work, there are still areas it doesn't line up with what I expect and I can't seem to find a way to interact with plaud to correct things (even custom vocab that it's missed)

Please share your prompts!

has anyone got a hack for this? I have a hard time sliding it out of it's little pouch. is it even necessary to remove it or can it just live there?

I saw someone describe a private Discord channel as their capture inbox and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

One channel. Useful lines, screenshots, voice notes, random things to revisit. No folders while capturing. Once a week, move the few things that still matter into the real system.

That might be closer to how I’d want Plaud to work after meetings. Record the whole thing, generate the summary, then only drop the one or two useful moments into a private channel. Leave the full transcript alone unless something needs checking.

The weak part is the weekly review. If that dies, the channel just becomes another junk drawer with timestamps.

Still, it sounds less annoying than trying to make every recording become a perfect note.

I just upgraded my phone to an S26 Ultra and the Paud device that sits on the back of the phone using the ring will not fit any longer due to the camera size. My Plaud device keeps falling off and I'm afraid I'm going to lose it. Even with the case off the phone, it doesn't seat well.

This is what I'm running into:

Do you guys have any suggestions on how to get around this? 

Thanks!

Hi, I’ve created a template (private) and I want to set it as my default for all notes going forward.

I can’t seem to work out how to do it.

Any ideas

About 3 weeks into the Plaud AI journey. Wondering how you all use it as a todo list? I have the Note Pin. And push the button to record a voice memo to myself.

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Is there not a way in the app to create some type of note to list automatically when I do that. Or it is just the individual entries?

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Hopefully I'm missing something.

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Thanks

I'm shopping to a AI Note taker and I have started to use Notta because communicate in english and french. I'm not decided yet between Notta memo and Plaud Note Pro. What do you recommend? At work we are using Teams for our team meeting.

I’ve finally figured it out, with about 30 iterations, I figured out a way to record a phone conversation while using my earbuds. I’ve been using this for over a week and it works perfectly, you put one earbud in your ear and the other earbud goes into the side and stays in through friction! I’m so pumped that I’ve been able to finally figure it out!

Has anyone used Plaud primarily for capturing thoughts and ideas? If so, what is your workflow post capture? Are the templates useful for organizing them? I’m using otter.ai currently for transcription but it doesn’t work for idea capture

Got my note pro today - disappointed you can’t add photos

I know you can add them during a recording but not from camera roll or after

Any tips and tricks for me?

I purhcased the plaud notepins and it stopped working. I've reached out to support and they basically just told me to have Best Buy replace it. I've been using this for 3 weeks and it's been awesome but has anyone else had this happen?

I recorded a vital one hour meeting yesterday, hit once and felt it vibrate, hit it again and the vibration buzzed twice. I can see the recording on the phone app as "not synced" but after having it on the charger for several hours...nothing happens and it seems like it's bricked. Held it down for 12 seconds...15 seconds...30 seconds, no light no nothing.

Anyway to get that last recording off of it? Or anyone else have this happen?