When you pause a meeting recording, it should actually stop

When someone pauses a meeting recording, capture should stop. The coffee break, private aside, or off-record discussion should not be recorded, uploaded, transcribed, or included in the stored duration.

Scripta uses the browser's real MediaRecorder.pause() operation. The control does not merely change a red dot or tell the interface to ignore audio later.

A pause button is a promise

People pause for a reason. Someone may leave the room. The group may take a break. A participant may ask to discuss something off the record.

If the interface says Paused while the underlying recorder continues, the product has broken the meaning of the control. Removing the interval later is not equivalent: the audio was still captured and may already have entered storage or processing.

A reliable recording tool should make the user's action true at the capture layer.

Recorded time is not wall-clock time

Real pause behavior creates a second requirement: the timer must measure active recording segments.

Suppose a team records for 20 minutes, pauses for a 10-minute break, then records for another 15 minutes. The saved duration should be 35 minutes, not 45. Measuring the wall clock between Start and Finish would put the break back into the record as time, even when it is absent from the audio.

Scripta accumulates elapsed time across active segments. This keeps the timer, stored duration, and actual recording aligned.

That alignment is operationally useful. A person can see how much meeting audio exists, and the plan's per-recording limit applies to captured material rather than time spent away from the call.

Consent belongs before Start

Pause protects a decision made during capture. Consent protects the decision to capture at all.

In Scripta, consent is a gate immediately before recording begins. The person recording confirms that everyone was told. The server stamps who made that confirmation and when. A recording without the stamp is refused for transcription.

This is not legal advice; recording rules differ by place and circumstance. It is a product rule: consent cannot be treated as decorative copy beside a Start button.

Finish should also mean what it says

After Finish, the browser uploads the completed audio once to private storage, then Scripta sends it for batch transcription. There is no live transcript during the meeting because nothing is sent mid-meeting.

The sequence is deliberately legible:

• Start begins local capture.
• Pause stops capture.
• Resume begins a new active segment.
• Finish ends capture and starts upload.

Each control names a real change in the system. That is a small design standard with large consequences: people can make informed choices without guessing what the software is doing behind the button.

Use pause as a team norm

The product control works best when the team has a shared habit around it:

1. say aloud that the recording is paused;
2. confirm the indicator has changed;
3. resume only after the group is ready;
4. restate any decision that should enter the record after capture resumes.

That last step prevents an awkward gap. If the team makes a real decision during an off-record break, the record cannot infer it. A short spoken recap after Resume preserves the outcome without capturing the private discussion that produced it.

The same discipline helps later when turning the transcript into a decision record that survives: preserve the conclusion and reasoning people intended to keep, not every sound that happened near the meeting.

Nothing of Scripta's ever joins the call. The person controls recording in their browser, and Start, Pause, Resume, and Finish each do exactly what they say.