Fathom is great at recording. It's less great when you want your meetings out — all of them, in files you own, that you can search or hand to someone else.

Here's how to do it properly, with and without a tool.

What Fathom gives you natively

Per meeting, you can open the meeting and download its transcript. That works fine for one meeting. For 40 meetings, it's 40 rounds of open, wait, download, rename, and lose track of which ones you've done.

Fathom also now has an API and webhooks on all plans, which is the developer route: pull meetings programmatically if you can write and run code against it. Most people reading this can't, or don't want to maintain a script for it.

The manual method that actually scales

  1. Create one folder, e.g. meetings-export, with subfolders by month.
  2. Work from Fathom's meeting list, newest to oldest, and rename every file the same way the moment you download it: YYYY-MM-DD-title.txt. The date-first name is what makes everything later — searching, sorting, deduping — possible.
  3. Keep a simple checklist (a text file is fine) of meeting titles as you go. The #1 bulk export failure is exporting the same meeting twice and missing another one entirely, and a checklist is the only thing that catches it.
  4. When you're done, you have files you own. What you don't have yet is a way to search across all of them at once, or a list of what they committed to. Your file search can find a word, but it can't tell you who owes what by Friday.

The tool method

Disclosure: I built MeetScribe, so take this part with that in mind.

MeetScribe imports a whole folder at once (TXT, VTT, SRT, JSON), reads the date and source from the file name or header if they aren't in the content, skips a file you've already imported instead of duplicating it, and stores everything in one library you can export in bulk to Markdown or text, one file per meeting or one combined file, each with a word count and speaking-share summary.

Commands, once it's installed:

python -m meetscribe import ~/meetings-export python -m meetscribe export --out ~/Documents/meetings-export-clean

Free trial covers your first 5 imports, so you can test it on five real meetings before paying anything. It's $29 one time after that: https://solopreneur87.gumroad.com/l/mrysy It runs offline, on your machine, and it also does one thing a plain export doesn't: it extracts action items and decisions with owners and due dates.

Which should you pick?

Under 10 meetings you'll ever export: manual, it's free and it's done.
Dozens of meetings, or a recurring habit: the manual renaming and checklist tax comes back every time. That's the point where a tool pays for itself — whether it's mine or a script you maintain.

Either way: export your meetings. A library that lives only inside someone else's app isn't a library you own.