Can You Upload a Past Recording to an AI Notetaker?

Two of them say yes, two say no

You have a folder of recordings. Calls from a customer discovery round, a board session someone remembered to hit record on, the handover from a person who has since left. You are picking a meeting notes tool, and the obvious thought is that the right one will swallow all of it and give you a searchable archive on day one.

Fireflies takes uploads. Its guide publishes a format table covering MP3, M4A and WAV for audio and MP4 and WEBM for video, and an upload flow that ends with the recording appearing in your meetings list with a transcript, summary and action items. Otter takes uploads too. Its help centre lists a long format list including Apple Voice Memos, and allows files up to 5 GB.

Granola does not. Its transcription documentation says in one sentence that it does not support importing or uploading pre-recorded audio files, MP3s included. Fathom does not either. Its help centre answer to this exact question says Fathom can only record and transcribe live meetings on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, that uploaded calls are not supported, and that it therefore cannot produce a summary without recording the meeting itself. The same answer says uploads are on its roadmap, so check again before you rule it out.

The split is not random. A tool that sends a bot into your call already runs a cloud transcription pipeline, and a pipeline that accepts a stream will accept a file. A tool that listens on your own machine has no pipeline pointed at files at all. Knowing which side a product sits on tells you more than the feature list does.

An import spends the same minutes your live meetings need

This is the part that gets skipped. Otter states it plainly on its import page: each imported file counts toward your plan's transcription and recording limits. The minutes you spend on a recording from March are minutes you no longer have for the calls happening this week.

Fireflies puts numbers on it. A paid seat gets 3,000 processing minutes a month, with overage at a cent a minute after that, and the page notes that unused minutes do not carry over. So price the backfill. Five hours of calls a week for a year is 260 hours, or 15,600 minutes. One seat's monthly allowance covers about a fifth of that. Push the whole year through in one month and you are paying overage on 12,600 minutes, which is $126. Spread it across the year instead and roughly half of every month goes to last year while this year competes for the rest.

Free tiers do not give you a way around this, because the import allowance is where they are tightest. Otter's Basic plan allows three file imports for the life of the account, not three a month, and shows only the first 30 minutes of the transcript for any conversation or import until you upgrade, inside a 300 minute monthly total. Three files with half an hour visible from each is not an archive. It is barely a test.

Every file hits a ceiling, and it lands on your longest meetings

Fireflies caps every uploaded file at 150 minutes. That is not a free-tier restriction; the same 150 minutes appears in the Pro, Business and Enterprise column. Video size splits by plan, 100 MB on Free against 2 GB on paid, and audio sits at 500 MB either way. Otter's ceiling is a flat 5 GB per file.

Look at which meetings that excludes. The planning offsite. The board session with the long Q and A at the end. The four hour customer workshop where the requirements were actually settled. Those are the recordings worth carrying forward, and they are exactly the ones a 150 minute limit turns away. Nobody finds this out while reading pricing pages. They find it out on the third file, the one they cared about.

There are smaller traps under the ceiling. Fireflies generates a recap only for recordings longer than three minutes, and if it detects no speech it produces nothing at all, no transcript and no summary. Otter warns that an upload can fail if the device goes to sleep partway through, which is a real risk on the multi-gigabyte files you are most motivated to move.

The recordings you plan to import are already expiring

Most backfill plans assume the files will wait. They usually will not. Microsoft's documentation for Teams recording expiration states that meeting recordings and transcripts have a default expiration time of 120 days, after which OneDrive and SharePoint move them to the recycle bin on their own.

The sentence that follows is the one worth reading twice. Any change to the expiration setting applies only to newly created recordings, and you cannot change the expiration time on recordings and transcripts that already exist. An admin who turns expiry off today has protected next quarter's recordings and done nothing for last quarter's. Once expired files are purged from the recycle bin, Microsoft says they cannot be recovered. It also notes that a non-channel meeting recording generally lands in the organiser's OneDrive, so the file you are counting on may not be in your storage at all.

Coming from the other direction, the problem is simpler. If your current notetaker is one of the local-capture ones, there is no file to move, because Granola's documentation says it does not record or save audio or video at any point during the call. A tool switch in that world starts from the day of the switch whatever anyone decides about imports.

So the plan of picking a tool now and backfilling when there is time has a deadline attached to it, and the deadline was set by someone else.

An imported meeting arrives dated wrong

A live capture knows when it happened. An uploaded MP4 does not, and the tools handle that by asking you. In the Fireflies upload flow, setting the meeting date is step four and it is marked optional, which means the default is the day you uploaded the file. Their own guide spells out the consequence: choose last week's date and the recording sits with your other meetings from that day instead of with today's uploads.

Skip it and a Friday afternoon of uploading 40 files produces 40 meetings that all happened on Friday. Every one of them is searchable and none of them is in order, which matters because most of the questions you will ask an archive are ordering questions. Which of these two conversations came first. What changed between the one in March and the one in June. When did this stop being true.

Audio is the second gap. Otter's own guidance says transcript quality depends on the recording, and names background noise, several people speaking at once, a poor microphone and low volume as the things that degrade it. Old recordings were made so a person could watch them back, not so a model could separate four voices in a conference room. Expect the backfilled part of your archive to read worse than the part you captured deliberately.

Three recordings that usually are worth uploading

None of this means uploads are useless. It means they are worth spending on specific files rather than on a back catalogue.

The first is the call where a commitment is now in dispute. One recording, one question, and an answer that either settles it or shows that nobody actually said the thing. The second is a batch of discovery or user interviews you are about to synthesise, which is research work with a deadline rather than memory you will query for years. The third is a handover recording from someone who has left, where the alternative is that the knowledge simply goes.

At that volume every limit above stops mattering. Three files fit inside any allowance, are short enough to clear the duration cap, and are few enough that setting the date by hand takes a minute. The failure mode is the ambitious version, where someone blocks out a day to import two years of calls and ends up with a pile of same-day meetings, a spent monthly allowance and the longest sessions rejected.

Where Driffle sits, limit included

Driffle does not accept uploaded recordings. It captures while the meeting is happening, transcribing audio from your own device and writing the summary as you wrap, with no bot in the invite and no red dot on the call. Speakers, decisions and action items are pulled automatically, and when you ask a question later the answer comes back with the moment it came from.

Our own comparison page against Otter says the same thing from the other side: transcribing uploaded recordings and interviews is listed there as a reason to choose Otter instead of us. That is still accurate. If the job in front of you is a stack of files, buy the tool built for stacks of files.

The trade is worth naming honestly. A Driffle archive starts the day it is installed, and the calls from March stay where they are. What you get in exchange is an archive where every entry was captured the same way, dated by the meeting rather than by the upload, and deep enough after a few weeks that the questions you ask across meetings have somewhere to land. Most people who want to import two years of recordings are really trying to buy that feeling on day one, and the backfill is a slower, more expensive way to get a worse version of it.

If capture from today is the trade you would make, you can get the Mac app at https://driffle.ai/download.