Recording and microphone problems

Recording will not start until the consent step is confirmed. That is deliberate. The microphone opens only after someone has said the conversation may be recorded, so a debrief can never begin by accident.

Your browser refused the request, usually because access was declined once before and the answer was remembered. Open the lock or settings icon in the address bar, allow the microphone for this site, reload the page, and start again.

On an iPhone or iPad, check Settings, then Safari, then Microphone, and make sure DebriefMD is not set to Deny. A managed hospital device may block microphone access at the policy level, in which case your IT department has to lift it.

The browser cannot see an input device at all. On a laptop, check that a headset has not been half-unplugged and that the right input is selected in your system sound settings. Reload DebriefMD after changing it, because the browser reads the device list when the page loads.

Something else holds the microphone: a video call, a voice memo, a dictation app, a screen recorder. Close it fully rather than minimising it, then try again.

Capture runs in the page, so keep DebriefMD open and the screen awake while a preceptor is talking. Locking the phone or switching to another app can stop the recording, and a timer that has quietly stopped is the one failure that cannot be repaired afterwards.

If you need a break mid-conversation, use pause rather than leaving the page. Pause and resume produce one continuous recording.

Hold the phone somewhere between you and the preceptor rather than flat on a desk. Step out of a busy nursing station if you can. Transcription copes well with normal ward noise and with both English and Canadian French, but it cannot recover a voice it never picked up. Pick your language before you record, because that choice decides which transcription runs.

You can play back any recording from its debrief page. If it came out unusable, the honest move is to ask for the feedback again rather than to submit a guess.

That is fine. Capture works offline, and the recording waits on your device until a connection comes back.