Magicnote is a notebook that listens, watches, and helps you think. You write in it the way you'd write in any notebook — pages inside folders — but it can also record audio, take photos, accept drawings, and talk to an assistant that reads and edits alongside you. This page walks through what it's like to use.
The chat pane isn't a chatbot off to the side. It reads the card you're on, runs whatever capabilities it needs, and writes the result back into the page. A few snapshots of that happening.
You ask for an expanded section on boat tours. The assistant checks which card you're on, figures out what it's about, and writes the new bullets straight onto the page. Each step is visible in the thread, so when something goes sideways you can see where.
You can also point the assistant at a folder and say "every card in here should start with a map section, then an overview, then the rest." It proposes the structure, you say go, and from then on every new card in that folder begins life with that skeleton.
Hit LIVE and pick what you want. Whisper runs offline; Deepgram nova-3 runs in the cloud and is faster on long sessions. Same dialog lets you pick the audio source (mic, or the output of any running app on the laptop) and turn on per-paragraph translation with Claude or offline Marian as the backend.
Cards, folders, artifacts, individual blocks — all soft-deleted. The Recover window shows what's gone and puts it back exactly where it came from. Mistakes aren't permanent, including the ones the assistant makes on your behalf.
Right-click any folder and pick Export website…
You get a self-contained zip — clean HTML, all the assets, a
manifest.json, and a README. It's both a
browser-printable archive of your work and a handoff bundle the
assistant (or any other LLM tool) can read end-to-end. The same
menu is where folder-wide transcription defaults live.
Microphone gain on the Surface is two knobs you have to set together; magicnote shows you the combined dB so you stop guessing. API keys for Anthropic, Deepgram, and Hugging Face live in one place and are saved to a mode-0600 file. Translation source and target language sit alongside.
App-wide defaults for the transcribe action live here. But if you set different defaults on a folder — say, Vietnamese with a glossary prompt for your trip folder — those win for any card inside it. The right setting follows the work, not a global toggle.
One-click Back up notebook… from the hamburger
menu writes a tarball using SQLite's online-backup API, so it's
consistent even if you're mid-edit. A
magicnotesurface-backup CLI does the same thing
headlessly. A magicnotesurface-backup-s3 CLI pushes
the same byte-identical bundle to MinIO, S3, B2, R2, or Wasabi
and re-verifies it by SHA-256.
Write a note. Record the lecture you're sitting in. Photograph the whiteboard. Scribble on that photo with the stylus. Ask it to transcribe. Ask it to translate. Everything stays on the same page, in the order it happened.
You're not chatting with a stranger. The assistant sees the page you're on, the folder you're in, and what you've been working on recently. "Summarise this" works. "What did I write about Kyoto last week?" works.
Your notes, recordings, photos, and drawings live on your own machine. No cloud sync you didn't turn on. You supply your own Anthropic key to talk to the assistant; if you don't, the notebook still captures, searches, and edits. It just stops being a chatty one.
Transcription runs locally. Translation to English or Vietnamese has an offline fallback if the internet's gone. The parts that need the cloud say so. The parts that don't, don't.
When you open magicnote, the window splits into three columns. On the left, a sidebar lists your folders and cards — this is the tree you browse. In the middle, the card you're currently on. On the right, the chat pane where you talk to the assistant.
If you rotate the Surface into portrait, the layout gracefully flips. The sidebar collapses into an overlay you can pull out, and the chat pane docks to the bottom.
Cards are pages. Click the "new card" button in the sidebar. Give it a title. Start typing. Autosave kicks in after a second of idle — you never have to hit save.
A card can hold more than text. It can hold photos, voice memos, videos, drawings, maps, transcripts, translations, and the assistant's replies — all as blocks on the same page, in the order you added them. You drag to reorder. You right-click to operate on any block.
Type like you'd type anywhere. Selecting text gives you a small popover with bold / italic / code / bullet list / numbered list. Headings are under the same popover. Nothing exotic — the goal is that if you've used any modern editor, you already know how.
The toolbar at the bottom of the card has four capture buttons: camera, voice, video, and app audio. Each of them attaches an artifact to the card you're on, in the position you're looking at. Let's walk through what each one feels like.
Tap the camera button. A viewfinder appears. Tap the shutter (or hit Space). Brief flash, and the photo lands on the card. If the photo's EXIF data has GPS coordinates and the card doesn't have a location yet, magicnote auto-stamps the card with where you were.
There's a small switcher for front/back camera. Autofocus happens before the shutter closes — you won't get a soft photo because you tapped fast.
Tap the mic button. A slim recording bar slides in under the header with a timer and two choices: Stop & Save or Discard. You can keep typing. You can switch cards. You can take a photo. The recording keeps going.
Stop & Save writes the audio to the card you started recording on (even if you've navigated away). Discard just throws it out.
Tap the video button. A small preview window appears — it's non-modal, so it floats while you do other things. There's a 2.5 second warmup before recording starts, so the auto-exposure and auto-focus can settle. No blown-out first frame.
This one's a superpower. Tap the app-audio button and a dialog lists every application on your laptop that's making sound — Firefox playing a lecture, Zoom, mpv, anything. Pick one. Magicnote records its output cleanly and attaches the file to your card.
This means you can listen to a seminar, capture the slides' audio, and keep typing your own notes alongside — all on the same page. No virtual audio devices, no "stereo mix" hacks. It just works.
Pick up your Surface Slim Pen and tap the pencil icon on any photo, or start a blank drawing from the toolbar. You get a palette of ten colours, a brush size slider, pen and eraser toggles, and undo/redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y). The pen is pressure-sensitive.
Drawings are re-editable in place. Tap the pencil again later and you can keep refining — lines aren't flattened into the image until you want them to be.
Open the map dialog from the toolbar. Pan and zoom through a real world map (via OpenStreetMap tiles). Flip into drawing mode to pin a route, mark a destination, or annotate. The map preview lives on your card as a block; tap the pencil to edit it later.
The chat pane on the right is attached to the card you're on. Anything you type there is a question about this card, with full access to the card's contents. Some things to try:
The assistant streams its reply into the card as a block. You can edit it afterwards the same way you'd edit text you typed yourself.
Right-click any audio block and pick one of: Quick (fast, good enough), Accurate, Best (slower, better), or Plain text. The transcript appears as a new block right below the audio.
Under Custom… you can choose the model, turn on speaker separation (useful for a recorded conversation), set the language if the auto-detect guesses wrong, and optionally seed the transcriber with an initial prompt ("lecture on Vietnamese grammar, expect technical terms").
Press the LIVE button on the card footer and start speaking. Your words appear as they're recognised. Paragraphs form automatically when you pause or another speaker starts. When you're done, save the transcript to the card.
There's an optional "Translate live to:" dropdown. Turn it on and each finalised paragraph emits a translation alongside it. Useful if you're sitting in a talk in a language you're still learning.
Right-click any text, transcript, LLM reply, or summary block and pick Translate ▸. You'll see four options: English (Claude), Vietnamese (Claude), English offline (Marian), Vietnamese offline (Marian).
The Claude options give you the best quality. The offline Marian options work with no internet and no API key at all — useful when you're on a plane, on a train, or in a café with flaky WiFi. If Claude isn't reachable, magicnote will fall back to Marian on its own and tell you why.
There's a search box above the folder tree. Type a word and the sidebar swaps into a flat list of matching cards. It searches titles and contents (including derived transcripts). Hit Escape to drop back to the folder view.
Above the folders there's also a media tree — every audio file, every photo, every drawing, every video, every map, all grouped by kind. Click one and you jump straight to the card it lives on, with the block highlighted.
Right-click any folder in the sidebar for: new subfolder, rename, delete (its cards reparent automatically), set default spell, set transcription defaults. Folders nest as deep as you want.
Spells are rules you can attach to a card, a folder, or globally. Click ✦ Spells in the topbar to open the library. Examples:
Spells follow whatever you're working on. If two attached spells disagree, the assistant reconciles them or asks you, depending on the Spell conflict mode setting.
The ⚙ gear in the topbar gives you:
Every recording, every photo, every drawing, every assistant reply lives in your notebook on your machine. If you want to move it to a different laptop, you copy one folder. If you want to back it up, you back up one folder. If you want to stop using it tomorrow, your notes are still plain files you can open.