Recording permissions

Bristlenose can pull meeting recordings out of Microsoft Teams or Google Meet and into a project, so you don't have to download them one at a time first.

Each platform decides for itself which recordings a signed-in person may read. So some meetings appear in the import list — with their date, their length and who was in them — and still can't be fetched. Bristlenose says so on the row rather than failing halfway through a download, and this page explains what each reason means and what you can do about it.

Importing from a meeting platform is a macOS app feature. The command line doesn't offer it.

What the status column is telling you

Four of the reasons a recording can't be fetched come from the platform rather than from your Mac:

Status	What it means
Someone's name	They organised the meeting, so the recording is in their account, not yours. Ask them for the file.
Needs access	Bristlenose is signed in, but a permission it needs wasn't granted. Sign in again and accept it.
Needs a paid plan	This account's plan doesn't include meeting recording at all.
Unavailable	The platform listed a recording for the meeting and then didn't return a file for it.

Not recorded is a different thing and doesn't appear here: nothing was withheld, nobody pressed record. A month of meetings you didn't record is an ordinary month, not a permissions problem.

Two more statuses describe your own Mac rather than the platform — a recording you already imported, or one on a drive that isn't plugged in. Neither needs anything from Teams or Google.

Microsoft Teams

A recording belongs to the account that made it. For a scheduled meeting that's the organiser's OneDrive; for a 1-1 or group call it's whoever pressed Record. Bristlenose reads your own Recordings folder, so a call a colleague recorded won't appear as yours to fetch even though you were in it. Ask them to share the file and add it from Finder.

Channel meetings are stored somewhere else again. A meeting held in a Teams channel saves its recording to the team's SharePoint site rather than to anyone's OneDrive, so it isn't in the folder Bristlenose reads.

You need a work or school account. On a personal Microsoft account a recording is attached to the meeting chat and the OneDrive folder is never created, so there's nothing to list.

Your organisation may allow watching but not downloading. Some tenants block downloads of meeting recordings. There's no way around that from Bristlenose, and no manual route either — the file can't be downloaded by hand and then dragged in.

How long recordings last is your organisation's setting. An administrator can have Teams delete meeting recordings automatically. Bristlenose can't read that setting with the permissions it holds, which is why Teams rows show no expiry countdown. If recordings on your tenant expire, import them before they do.

Bristlenose asks Microsoft for two things: read access to your files, and read access to your calendar. The calendar read is what supplies the meeting title and who was in the call — a recording carries neither. Teams transcripts need a permission only an administrator can grant, so Bristlenose doesn't ask for one and doesn't fetch them.

Microsoft's own documentation: where recordings are stored · play, share, and download recordings

Google Meet

Recording is a paid Google Workspace feature. A personal Google Account signs in perfectly well and has a full calendar, and can never have recorded a Meet call — so every row will say Needs a paid plan. Recording also has to be turned on by a Workspace administrator, and it isn't included in every edition.

Only meetings you organised. A Meet recording is saved to the organiser's Drive, and Google will only tell Bristlenose about recordings for meetings you organised yourself. Someone else's meeting shows their name instead of a checkbox.

Older meetings stop being findable, even when the file is still there. Google lets Bristlenose look up a meeting's recording for about 30 days after the call. The recording itself stays in your Drive indefinitely — but past that window Bristlenose can no longer connect the meeting to its file, and the row reads Not recorded. If you're importing something older than a month, open it in Drive and add it from Finder instead.

That's also why the window control in the toolbar matters. Looking back 60 or 90 days will list the meetings, but recordings older than about 30 days won't come with them.

You approve the files themselves. Google's permission model for this is per file, not per account: after you tick what you want, Google shows you its own file picker to confirm that exact set. Bristlenose can only read the files you pick there, and nothing else in your Drive.

One consequence worth knowing: Google doesn't let an app ask for one extra permission on its own. If you declined something during sign-in, signing in again re-presents the whole consent screen rather than just the missing part.

Google's own documentation: record a video meeting · turn Meet recording on for an organisation

When nothing else works

Every recording you can see in Teams or Drive can be downloaded by hand and dragged into a project, and Bristlenose treats it exactly the same as one it fetched itself. The import window is a shortcut, not the only door — the one exception is a tenant that blocks downloads outright, where there is no file to drag.