2.0.0 - the recording now lands as a rectangle on the drawing

The recording now lands on the drawing as a rectangle that plays it.

1.x pointed the drawing element straight at the MP3 file. Now the plugin writes a self-contained HTML page next to the audio (the audio inside it, in base64) and serves it from 127.0.0.1, so the rectangle shows a player that is always stopped — it never plays on its own — and it comes back when you reopen the drawing.

• The rectangle's colours and size are settings now.
• Two extra commands: Replot the last recording on the drawing and Rebuild the HTML pages of this folder.
• The diagnostic log records every request the local server answers — that is how you prove the rectangle loaded its page.

Honest limits: the rectangle works on this PC (the page is served by the plugin running here, so on another machine or with the app closed the rectangle is empty — the MP3 and the HTML stay valid anywhere); and changing the port breaks rectangles already plotted, because their URL lives inside the drawing.

Same plugin id (voicecomment), so this arrives as a normal update. The name in the plugin list becomes VoiceComment 2.0.

Requires Obsidian 1.4.0 or newer (desktop) and Excalidraw 2.x for the drawing part.

1.0.4 - the description no longer says the forbidden word

Fixes the directory review failure introduced by 1.0.3.

The 1.0.3 description used the word "Obsidian" ("Obsidian's recorder and the Excalidraw canvas joined in one element"). The community directory review rejects that, verbatim:

Plugin description must not include the word "Obsidian". The word "Obsidian" in the description is redundant. It is implied by the context of the plugin directory.

The description now reads:

Record voice notes as MP3 and drop the player exactly where you started: at the note cursor, or inside an Excalidraw drawing. The built-in recorder and the Excalidraw canvas joined in one element - one comment per idea, no ffmpeg, no cloud.

No behaviour changes: the code is identical to 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 (same SHA256 for main.js). The smoke test now fails if the word comes back to the description.

1.0.3 - the recorder and the canvas, joined

Obsidian's recorder and the Excalidraw canvas, joined.

The description now carries the point of the plugin - the two together in one element:

Record voice notes as MP3 and drop the player exactly where you started: at the note cursor, or inside an Excalidraw drawing. Obsidian's recorder and the Excalidraw canvas joined in one element - one comment per idea, no ffmpeg, no cloud.

No behaviour changes in this release: the code is identical to 1.0.2.

The README also now spells out that the microphone in Obsidian's icon bar is what drives the player inside the drawing, and that you can record as many audios as you want - one comment per idea you still want to develop.

1.0.2 - sharper catalog description

Sharper catalog text.

The description now says what the plugin actually does for a drawing - and what it does not depend on:

Record voice notes as MP3 and drop the player exactly where you started: at the cursor in a note, or inside an Excalidraw drawing. Audio comments for drawings, fully local - no ffmpeg, no Python, no cloud.

No behaviour changes in this release: the code is identical to 1.0.1. The README also gained a catalog image showing a voice comment recorded on a drawing.

VoiceComment 1.0.1

Maintenance release prepared for the Obsidian community directory submission.

Fixed — community directory compliance

• Marked the plugin as desktop-only, as required for plugins that use Obsidian's Electron API.
• Removed the default Alt+R hotkey. Plugins should not ship default hotkeys, because they override shortcuts the user may already have; assign one yourself in Settings → Hotkeys if you want it.
• The developer console now receives only errors. Routine diagnostics keep going to .obsidian/plugins/voicecomment/voicecomment.log.

Under the hood

• The offscreen probe used to measure the native player height is now sized by a CSS class instead of inline styles.
• Obsidian's DOM helpers are used instead of raw document.createElement.
• Log rotation reads the file size through try/catch rather than a promise chain.

Nothing changed in how recording, saving or insertion works.

VoiceComment 1.0.0

First public release.

Record with Alt+R and the MP3 player is inserted automatically, where you started:

• Markdown note — an audio embed ![[…]] at the cursor.
• Excalidraw drawing — a playable player element in the middle of the view, selected and ready to play.

The MP3 is encoded inside Obsidian. No ffmpeg, no Python, no cloud — nothing leaves your machine.

Highlights

• Two parallel capture paths: raw PCM straight into the encoder (single lossy generation), with a MediaRecorder capture as a safety net if WebAudio delivers nothing — so a recording is never lost.
• Pause/resume, live level meter, timer, discard.
• Status bar indicator and a floating panel showing which file you are recording into.
• Diagnostic log for troubleshooting.

Install

Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/voicecomment/, then enable the plugin. Or add Engenharick/voicecomment to BRAT.

Credits

• lamejs (LGPL-3.0) — bundled unmodified for MP3 encoding.
• Excalidraw for Obsidian by Zsolt Viczián — the ExcalidrawAutomate API that makes the drawing part possible.

Licensed under LGPL-3.0.