“Reliable capture into my pipeline, but it merges remote audio into one channel”

I used Granola to capture a call I took, and the part that won me over is what happened after the call ended: the recording dropped straight into my own transcription pipeline with no manual export step. I didn't click through a download, didn't fish a file out of some folder, didn't babysit a handoff. The capture just landed where my workflow expected it, and the pipeline picked it up and ran. For a builder, that's the whole point of a tool like this. The capture itself was solid and reliable; nothing dropped, nothing got mangled, and I didn't have to go back and re-record anything. That alone is worth a lot, because the failure mode I actually fear with meeting tools is a recording that's silently broken and you only find out when you go looking for it later. The one real catch showed up clearly once I had the transcript in hand. Granola merges all of the remote participants' audio into a single channel. So at capture time everything is fine, but when I later went to diarize the remote speakers apart, the work got harder than it needed to be. With one merged channel there's no per-speaker signal to lean on, so separating who-said-what on the remote side is something I had to do myself, and the tool gives you no help there. Net: reliable, low-friction capture, but lossy on speaker separation. If your downstream output depends on clean diarization the way mine does, you end up doing extra work that a multi-channel capture would have saved you, and that's the gap between this being a 4 and a 5 for me. I'm rating it 4 because the thing it's actually selling — getting a clean, trustworthy recording out of a call and into wherever you need it without manual steps — it nails. The no-export handoff is the feature I'll keep coming back for. I just wish the audio it produced preserved per-speaker channels instead of collapsing the remote side, because that single decision is what turned an otherwise finished transcript into a step I still had to finish by hand. Knowing the limitation, I'd still reach for it again; I'd just plan for the diarization work up front rather than expecting the tool to have handled it.

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