Murmur 2.9.0 — a public home, live markdown notes and a new shell

Murmur now has a public home: downloads, release notes and docs live at murmurnotes.io and in this repository. Update checks now look at this repository. If you are on 2.8.0 or earlier, install this version by hand once — after that, Settings → About → Check for updates finds new versions again.

Write and edit in one place

• Notes and meeting notes are a live markdown document: click the text to edit, click outside it to see the preview. The separate Edit/Preview switch is gone.
• Checklists (- [ ]) render as real checkboxes you can tick; the change is saved back to the note.
• Pasting or dropping an image into a meeting note puts it where your cursor is.
• Meeting notes get the same Ask Brain button as notes, and its panel lines up with the note header.

A new shell

• A slim icon rail on the left for Search, Smart organize, Browse, Ask, Settings and your account, and one top bar with your tabs and an always-visible new-note button.
• Drag the sidebar's right edge to make it wider or narrower (double-click to reset).
• Drag folders, projects, notes and recordings anywhere in the sidebar, including to the top level and back to Unfiled.
• Dashboards are now called Projects everywhere.

Organizing

• Smart organize replaces the old automatic filer: pick notes or recordings and a destination, choose a rule (by day or by how they are linked), review every move, then apply.
• Moving a meeting, note or document uses one hierarchy picker with search and breadcrumbs.
• Shared with you separates shared folders and Spaces from individual notes, and shows who shared what and what you can do with it.

Recording

• While you record, a live panel shows what you and the others are saying.
• When you stop, choose to process the recording now or later. Postponed recordings wait in a queue you can retry or clear.

Look and feel

• Three skins — Minimalist, Studio and Paper — each in light and dark, rebuilt on one consistent design system.
• Polish letters render in the app's own typeface instead of a fallback font.
• Action-item checkboxes in a meeting now tick the task in the note, and long reminder descriptions are shown in full.

Downloads

The DMG is signed and notarized by Apple and runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 13.4 or later. Verify it against SHA256SUMS.txt with shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt.

Murmur 2.8.0 — one command row, one drawer, one sidebar rhythm

Originally released on 2026-09-14.

The meeting view stops being a pile of panels. Everything that acts on a meeting now lives in the title row; everything that is a view of it opens as one right-docked drawer.

The meeting command row

• Every action moved into the title row and became icon-only. No label was deleted — each stays in the DOM as screen-reader text, so the accessible name is unchanged.
• Action items, Live context, Smart reminders and Ask were four independent toggles pretending to be independent. The shell only ever holds one open drawer, so they are now a segmented switcher that says so — choosing one retires the other, and "nothing open" stays a real state.
• All fourteen icon controls got a real tooltip, replacing the native title that waited a second and a half, drew in the system's style, and was unreachable from the keyboard.

Sidebar

One row rhythm for the whole column. The destination rows, the workspace and shared trees, and the "View all" continuation were authored in three different places and had drifted to three different heights, pitches and label offsets; they now share one. The unfiled "View all" also got back the nesting step it had lost.

Notes

The Properties card above every note body is gone — the tags row, the typed property widgets and + Add property. Front-matter itself is untouched: a note's tags: and properties still parse on load and serialize on save, so nothing is stripped from the .md files in your vault.

Fixed

• Paper skin: the tab strip was dead to clicks. Neither the close glyph nor the + responded, because the window-drag band overlapped the strip and won every hit test. The strip's controls now rank above it.

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Download Murmur-2.8.0.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.8.0) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.7.1 — Sync now stops wedging the app

Originally released on 2026-09-08.

A patch release that unwedges organization sync.

Sync now no longer hangs — and no longer takes the rest of the app with it

Pressing Sync now in Settings › Organizations deadlocked the app's organization subsystem. The command took an internal lock and then, still holding it, called a routine that takes the same lock again — so it waited on itself forever. It never returned, and every organization operation afterwards (sharing, joining, unlocking a locked folder) blocked with no error and no timeout. The only way out was to quit and reopen Murmur.

If you have pressed Sync now and then found sharing quietly stopped working, that was this.

Sync actually catches up now

A manual sync used to fetch four items and report itself finished. A shared Space therefore arrived a few objects at a time, minutes apart — the Space first, its folders later, the notes later still — while the button said "up to date" at every step.

• Sync now keeps fetching until the organization is caught up, and says so honestly when it stops early: "More is still arriving in the background."
• The background sync now catches a backlog up in seconds instead of four objects a minute, and goes quiet again once it is done.
• The button shows what it is doing — Syncing… 24, then Syncing folders… — instead of a spinner you cannot tell apart from a hang.

Signing in refreshes your organizations

Unlocking sharing with Touch ID restored your session but asked the server nothing, so the sidebar kept whatever it had read before you signed in — often until you restarted the app. Signing in now refreshes your organizations and the sidebar straight away.

Settings no longer says you are in no organization when it just could not check

If reading your organizations failed, the panel showed "You're not in any organization yet" — to people who belong to several — and switching tabs and back was the only way to retry. A failed read now says so, keeps the organizations it already knew about on screen, and retries underneath.

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Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel), Developer-ID signed, notarized and stapled. Requires macOS 13.4 or later.

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Download Murmur-2.7.1.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.7.1) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.7.0 — a skin that gets out of the way, and reminders inside the note

Originally released on 2026-09-07.

Two things in this release, and they pull in the same direction: making the note a place you can
actually sit and work in. One changes what the app is made of, the other gives a note somewhere to
keep its follow-ups.

A Theme skin, and a quiet one called Paper

Settings → Appearance gains a Theme section above the light/dark control, with two skins:
Studio — the frosted-glass look Murmur has always shipped — and Paper.

A skin is a second axis, not a third theme. Light/dark decides how bright the app is; the skin
decides what it is made of. Both work with all three of Light, Dark and System.

Paper is a document skin, for people who read and write all day. Glass and the aurora are off.
Surfaces are opaque and warm, borders are hairlines instead of shadows, radii are tighter, easing is
flat, and the accent is an ink blue rather than the indigo that reads as another AI product. The
shell stops floating: the sidebar and the note's tool column are glued to the window and separated by
a single hairline, the way Obsidian and Notion do it.

It reads and writes the note at one size — 16px/1.7. The document used to render markdown at one
size and edit at another, so the same paragraph broke at different words and the text shifted every
time you toggled between reading and writing. Under Paper those are typographically identical and the
jump is gone. Studio is unchanged, down to the byte — that jump is a shipped default and changing it
for everyone is a separate decision.

Text contrast was measured off the live cascade rather than eyeballed: Paper clears 4.5:1 on all five
text pairs in both themes.

Reminders live in the note now

The note had a "New reminder" button and nowhere to see what it had created — a follow-up you made
from a note vanished into the global inbox and the note showed no trace of it.

There is now a reminders drawer, opened by a glyph beside Edit/Preview. It creates reminders
anchored to the note you are in and lists the ones already attached to it. The suggestions card goes
back to only staging suggestions, and collapses away entirely when it has none instead of leaving an
empty strip behind.

A completed reminder can be reopened. The circle only ever went one way, so ticking something off
by mistake finished it for good. It is a two-way toggle now, and reopening restores the reminder to
the Inbox if it is actually overdue — rather than parking it somewhere active-on-paper and invisible.

The Reminders page and the drawer are the same row. The page still drew the old card: a bar of
three text buttons under every row, four lines of chrome for one line of content. Both surfaces now
render one component in the compact Apple-Reminders shape — completion circle, text, and icon actions
that surface on hover.

Locked notes stay locked. A reminder attached to a note you have not unlocked this session arrives
with nothing to match, and the drawer does not render for a locked note at all.

Also fixed

• Renaming a note reaches the sidebar, not just the tab. The two read from different places, so a
  note you had just named still said "Untitled" in the tree — exactly when you are looking at it.
• The note tool pane's header controls take a click on their whole surface. The window-drag strip
  was hit-testing over the top third of "New reminder": perfectly visible, and dead to a click.
• Closing the reminders composer no longer loses focus entirely. This one only ever happened in
  the engine Murmur actually ships — so it was a real bug for every user while most tests were green.
• The note's tool pane is now the same kind of object as the sidebar, and picks up its rounding and
  material in Studio, its flatness in Paper.
• The drawers reach the edge of the content column instead of stopping 24px short of it.

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Requires macOS 13.4 or later. Universal (Apple silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

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Download Murmur-2.7.0.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.7.0) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.6.0 — ask inside one Space or folder

Originally released on 2026-09-04.

One thing in this release, and it answers a question the Related picker in 2.5.0 raised: linking a
folder tells you where something belongs, but it does not make an answer come from what is inside it.
Now you can ask for that directly.

Ask a question inside one Space or folder

Pick a Space or folder in the Ask Sources picker and the answer is drawn only from what is filed
under it — that folder, its sub-folders, and everything in them.

It narrows the search rather than stuffing the folder into the question, which is what makes it
usable on real folders: a Space holding a hundred notes costs the same as one holding five, and
relevance still decides what actually gets used inside it.

It stays current on its own. A note you write into that folder tomorrow is in scope the next time
you ask — nothing to re-pick, nothing to refresh. A sub-folder you create is included. A note you move
out drops out. Renaming the folder or moving it elsewhere changes nothing, because the scope follows
the folder itself, not its path.

That is the practical difference from picking individual notes as sources: those are a fixed list, and
the next note you write is invisible to it until you add it by hand.

Locked content stays locked. A scope can only ever narrow what you could already see — it is never
a way in. Scoping to a folder you have not unlocked this session returns nothing, not its contents.
And a scoped question stays inside its scope even when nothing matches: it will tell you it found
nothing there rather than quietly answering from the rest of your vault.

You can still pin individual notes alongside a scope; those are always included.

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Requires macOS 13.4 or later. Universal (Apple silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

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Download Murmur-2.6.0.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.6.0) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.5.0 — Related shows you where things live

Originally released on 2026-09-04.

Two things in this release: a Related picker that shows you where things actually live, and a retry
that no longer forgets who was speaking.

Related links now open on a hierarchy, not a flat list

Linking a note, a recording or a document to something else used to mean scrolling one long list of
titles with no sense of where anything sat. It is now the real hierarchy — Not classified, your
Spaces and folders, and any Shared Brains — and it opens centred on the item you are already
looking at, so you start from where you are rather than at the top of everything.

• Search covers the path, not just the title. Typing Product / Roadmap finds the folder, not
  only items whose own name contains those words.
• Big groups load as you reach them, so a Space with hundreds of items opens immediately.
• Keyboard all the way through — the list, the groups and the confirmation.
• A link to a Space or folder links to that container and nothing else. It never quietly fans out
  to everything inside it, and it stays exactly one relation.
• Locked content stays locked. Titles, counts, paths and previews behind a lock are as invisible
  here as everywhere else, including in search totals.

Container links now also survive the trash: move something to the trash and restore it, and its
relations come back with it. A Shared document that was permanently deleted stays deleted — restoring
cannot resurrect it.

Retrying a failed recording keeps Me and Others apart

A recording that failed to transcribe could always be retried, but the recovered transcript came back
as one unattributed voice. The reason was the archive itself: it mixes your microphone and the system
capture into a single track, so the speaker split is gone before a retry can look at it.

Failed recordings now keep each side as its own track, and a retry transcribes them separately and
merges them exactly as a live recording does — so Me and Others survive. The extra audio is kept
only for recordings that actually failed, is released as soon as a retry succeeds, and is sealed with
your folder like everything else. Older recordings, or ones whose extra tracks the storage limit has
already reclaimed, still retry the way they did before.

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Requires macOS 13.4 or later. Universal (Apple silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

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Download Murmur-2.5.0.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.5.0) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.4.0 — removing someone actually removes them

Originally released on 2026-09-03.

Murmur 2.4.0 closes a full production-readiness audit: 31 changes, most of them things that were
wrong rather than things that were missing.

Your data stays yours — even when it changes hands

Four fixes here, and the first two matter most if you share a Workspace with anyone.

• Removing someone from an org now actually removes them. The org content key is rotated when a
  member is removed, so a former member's copy of the key stops opening anything published
  afterwards. Previously the key survived the removal.
• An org invite pins the key it was accepted with (trust-on-first-use). A relay that swapped the
  public key mid-flight can no longer make you encrypt to a key you never agreed to.
• The database key is never re-minted over an existing database. A key mismatch now fails loudly
  and leaves your data alone instead of creating a second key that cannot open it.
• Deleting a note purges its Ask history with it. Answers derived from a deleted note no longer
  linger in chat history — and moving a note between Workspaces re-scopes it correctly.

Locking a folder no longer costs you anything

Manual links between notes and meetings, and the fact ledger the brain builds, both used to be
dropped by a lock → unlock cycle. They now survive it intact. Restoring a note from the trash brings
back its links, mentions and facts too, rather than a note stripped of everything it knew.

Transcription

• Words stopped falling into the gaps. Long recordings are decoded in windows, and those windows
  were read back-to-back — so a word straddling a boundary could be lost. The windows now overlap and
  a single owner is chosen for each boundary.
• The language stops flipping mid-recording. The language was detected per window, so a quiet
  stretch in a Polish meeting could hand the rest of it to English. It is now detected once and
  pinned.
• Retry is a button. A recording that failed to transcribe can be retried from the meeting itself
  instead of needing a restart.
• If system audio dies mid-meeting, Murmur says so. The far side of a call going silent used to
  be indistinguishable from nobody talking.

Speed

Opening the app and browsing long lists no longer blocks on the database. List reads moved off the
main thread, and /library and /notes render a window of rows rather than all of them.

New

• Update checks are opt-in and logged. Murmur asks before it ever contacts GitHub to look for a
  new version, and the request is recorded in the egress ledger like any other outbound call.
• A diagnostics bundle you can actually send. One button collects logs and environment details
  with no note content, no transcripts and no titles in it — the command that builds it has no
  access to the database at all, which is what makes that a guarantee rather than a promise.
• Logs are kept for 7 days with a size ceiling, instead of growing without bound.

Consistency

One name per level of the hierarchy. The same thing used to be a "space" in one menu, a "Workspace"
in the sheet that created it and a "container" in the view of it — sometimes within one session.

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Requires macOS 13.4 or later. Universal (Apple silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

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Download Murmur-2.4.0.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.4.0) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.3.1 — the org panel stops lying to you

Originally released on 2026-09-01.

A bug-fix release for one report: the Organization panel in Settings hung on
"Loading organizations…" and never recovered, and once it did load, sharing to
an org had silently stopped working while "Sync now" kept answering
"Synced — up to date."

That turned out to be four separate defects, three of which existed only to hide
the fourth.

The panel can no longer hang

Refreshing the org list waited on an internal sharing lock with no time limit. If
anything held that lock, the panel waited forever — and signing out did not help,
because the lock lives in the running app, so only a restart cleared it. The wait
is now bounded: if a sharing operation really is in flight, the panel says so and
shows your locally-known orgs instead of spinning.

"Sync now" stops claiming success over a failure

A manual sync also republishes your shared folders. When that leg failed it was
written to a log file and otherwise discarded, so the sync returned the same
empty result a genuinely clean sync returns — and the panel renders an empty
result as "up to date". A failure there now reaches you, and the message names
the actual error instead of always guessing that a key had not been granted yet.

A signed-out session says so

An expired session was swallowed in three places and rendered as an empty panel,
which looks exactly like being offline. Only a genuine sign-in failure is now
surfaced; offline and not-signed-in stay the quiet no-op they should be.

Failures name themselves

Every org failure was logged as the single unhelpful word unavailable, which is
why the original report took a full investigation to place. The log line now
carries the specific failure code, so a repeating background failure can be read
directly rather than reconstructed.

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Nothing else changed: no data migration, no format change, no new permissions.
If org sharing was failing for you, this build will tell you why in the developer
log — and in most cases the fix is a single click in Settings.

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Download Murmur-2.3.1.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.3.1) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.3.0 — developer mode, and Settings in front of you

Originally released on 2026-09-01.

Developer mode, and a log you can actually read

Turn on developer mode in Settings and Murmur keeps a readable log of what the app
is doing. A row expands into the whole entry, one filter bar narrows it down, and
entries are kept for 24 hours and then genuinely deleted — not trimmed, not archived.

Useful when something misbehaves and "it just didn't work" is not a bug report anyone
can act on.

Settings is a modal now

Settings used to be a pane wedged beside the app. It is now a modal over the window,
starting below the window-button band, with the selected section actually reading as
selected and the rail's scroll fade behaving at the last section.

Also

The landing page and README were still describing the shell 2.2.0 removed — Spaces is
called Workspaces everywhere now, and the sentence about "a persistent icon rail
plus a contextual panel" is gone, because that layout is. Trash, which shipped in 2.2.0
and was mentioned nowhere, is now described with its real 30-day retention.

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Requires macOS 13.4+. Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel), Developer-ID signed and
notarized — download, open, drag to Applications.

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Download Murmur-2.3.0.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.3.0) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.

Murmur 2.2.0 — one sidebar, and a Trash that gives things back

Originally released on 2026-09-01.

One sidebar instead of a rail and a panel

The separate icon rail and contextual panel are gone. There is now a single sidebar that
holds everything and collapses to a rail with one click — window buttons, Search, Ask and
Settings sit in a band level with the traffic lights, and Capture keeps its own wide button
in the footer.

Spaces are now Workspaces. Same thing, clearer name, and the tree gained a permanent
Shared section beside it. The main window also opens 30% larger by default.

Trash

Deleting a recording or a note no longer means it is gone. Items move to Trash and stay
recoverable for 30 days, with the Workspaces tree refreshing itself when you restore one.
Nothing in the app promises permanence on a delete that is now reversible.

Quick note

Quick note sits beside Capture in the sidebar footer. When you create a note, Murmur asks
where it goes — and can create that place for you if it does not exist yet. The Edit/Preview
toggle is now icon-only and remembers the mode you prefer.

Fixes

• A Space shared with you arrives with its contents, and sharing something with yourself
  renders once rather than twice.
• Settings is back beside the sidebar, along with the pieces the shell rewrite had dropped.

Also

The landing-page tour was re-cut from the real shipping UI: eighteen shots, a locked camera,
and every claim checked against the code that backs it.

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Requires macOS 13.4+. Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel), Developer-ID signed and notarized —
download, open, drag to Applications.

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Download Murmur-2.2.0.dmg below. The "Source code" archives are generated by GitHub from this repository (website and docs), not from the app.

This build (Murmur 2.2.0) was originally published under the GNU AGPL-3.0 while its source code was public.