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Watch folders are a Pro feature. They are not available on the Free plan.
Existing files are skipped, not backfilled. The first time Vowen sees a folder it takes a snapshot of everything already in it and marks all of it as handled, without transcribing any of it. Adding ~/Downloads does not kick off a run over the 400 files already sitting there. Only files that arrive after you add the folder are processed.If you want an existing file processed, move it out and back in, or use the manual Transcribe or Import flow instead.

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Overview

A watch folder is a directory on your machine that Vowen keeps an eye on. Drop an audio or video file into it and Vowen picks it up and runs it through one of two pipelines, depending on what kind of folder it is:

Transcription folders

The file becomes a manual transcription, exactly as if you had dropped it into the Transcribe dialog. Rules fall back to your Transcribe > Defaults.

Meeting note folders

The file becomes a full meeting note: transcribed, summarized with a template you pick, tagged, and pushed through your Obsidian and webhook integrations like a live recording.
A folder’s kind is fixed by where you added it. There is no destination switch inside the folder editor, so each list stays homogeneous. To change a folder’s kind, remove it from one list and add it again from the other.

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Where they live

Each modal lists only its own kind of folder.

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Adding a folder

1

Open the Watch folders tab

Use the table above to open the right one for the kind of folder you want.
2

Click Add Folder

A native folder picker opens. Pick the directory you want watched. The same path cannot be watched twice, even across the two lists.
3

Set the folder's rules

Vowen drops you straight into the folder’s editor. Everything here is optional, and anything you leave alone follows your defaults. Use the back button in the modal header when you are done.
Every folder row has a checkbox to enable or disable it, a pencil to reopen its rules, and a bin to stop watching it. A folder whose path no longer exists is marked Folder not found in red and is skipped until the path comes back.

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Which files are picked up

  • Audio: mp3, wav, m4a, aac, ogg, flac, wma, opus
  • Video: mp4, mov, avi, mkv, webm, flv, wmv, mpeg, mpg
Anything else is ignored, as are files whose name starts with a dot.
Vowen watches only the files directly inside the folder. Subfolders are not scanned, so nesting a directory inside a watch folder does nothing.
A new file is not queued the instant it appears. Vowen waits until its size has stopped changing across two checks two seconds apart, so a file that is still being copied or downloaded is never transcribed half-finished. If a file is still growing after about two minutes Vowen gives up on that attempt and retries on the next scan. Files that land while Vowen is closed are picked up the next time you launch it, because the record of what has already been handled is stored on disk rather than in memory. Jobs run strictly one at a time regardless of your plan. Dropping five recordings in at once queues five jobs, not five simultaneous transcription pipelines.
Vowen marks a file as handled the moment it is queued, before the job runs. If a job fails, the failed entry stays visible so you can retry it by hand. It is not re-queued automatically on the next scan.

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Per-folder rules

Open a folder’s editor with the pencil icon. Every row shows its effective value, so a rule you have not set reads as Notes default (Parakeet V2) or Transcription default (Auto-detect) rather than as blank.
Applied to every item the folder creates. Transcription folders draw from the transcription tag pool; meeting note folders draw from the notes tag pool, which is a separate list.On a meeting note folder these tags are combined with the tags the summary template already applies. The folder’s tags come first.
Which speech model transcribes files from this folder. Unset means the folder follows your default, which for a transcription folder is the Transcribe > Defaults model and for a meeting note folder is your meeting notes model.
Auto-detect, or a specific language. The list of choices depends on the model the folder resolves to, so changing the model can change what is offered here.
Meeting note folders only. The template used to summarize every note this folder produces. It also names the folder that gets written to Obsidian. Unset means the folder uses whatever your default template currently is.
Runs speaker diarization on files from this folder. Only shown when the folder’s model supports it.
Auto-detect, or a fixed count from 2 to 6. Only shown when speaker identification is on and the resolved model honours a speaker count.
Transcription folders only, and only while speaker identification is off. Meeting notes always keep segment timings, because the transcript in a note is clickable.
Shows a banner when the job finishes. On meeting note folders this is on by default, because the banner is how you find out the automation ran at all.
Once a folder has at least one override, a Reset folder rules row appears at the bottom of the editor. Resetting clears every override so the folder follows your defaults again.

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How inheritance works

A rule that is unset inherits, and the two kinds of folder inherit from different places:
  • Transcription folders resolve against transcribeDefaults, which is the Transcribe > Defaults tab: model, language, identify speakers, number of speakers, timestamps and notify. The auto-export settings on the Auto-export tab apply too, so a watched-folder transcription can write a .txt, .srt or .vtt alongside itself if you have that turned on.
  • Meeting note folders resolve against your meeting notes preferences, the same chain the Import dialog uses: model, language, diarization, AI provider and summary template.
Because inheritance is live, changing a default later changes what your folders do, for every rule you never overrode.

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What a meeting note folder produces

A note from a watch folder is a full note, not a stripped-down one. It is transcribed, summarized with the folder’s template, and then fires the same Obsidian and webhook integrations a live recording does. The note appears in your Notes list immediately as a processing placeholder, already carrying the folder’s tags and the template’s tags. It is not tagged later once the summary lands.

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Quotas and gating

  • Disabling the watch folders feature, or losing Pro, stops every folder. Nothing is queued while the entitlement is off.
  • Transcription folders still count against the lifetime manual-transcription quota. Once you are at the limit, new files are skipped rather than queued.
  • Meeting note folders go through the same import gate as the Import button, which is also Pro.
  • A file that already has a history entry or an existing note with the same source path is skipped, so importing something by hand first does not produce a duplicate.

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Disabling versus removing

These are not the same thing.Unticking a folder pauses it but keeps its record of which files it has already seen, so re-enabling it later picks up only what arrived while it was off.Removing a folder throws that record away. If you add the same path again afterwards, Vowen re-snapshots it from scratch. Nothing already in the folder is backfilled, but anything that arrived while the folder was removed is now treated as pre-existing and will never be processed.
Neither action touches transcriptions or notes that have already been created.

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Troubleshooting

Check the file extension is on the supported list, that the file is directly in the folder rather than in a subfolder, and that the folder’s checkbox is ticked. A very large file being copied across a slow network can also still be inside its stability window.
The path no longer exists, usually because an external drive is unmounted or the folder was renamed. Vowen skips it silently until the path is back. Remove the folder and add it again if the path has permanently changed.
That is the intended behavior. Existing files are seeded as already handled the first time the folder is registered. Transcribe them manually, or move them out and back in.
Files are marked handled when they are queued, not when they succeed, so a failure does not loop forever on every scan. Retry it from the transcription entry or the note itself.