Last updated: October 28, 2026
A Space is live right now and you want to keep it. The catch: there is no finished file yet. The only way to get one is to record the stream while it's happening, and that's exactly what spkeep does in your browser tab. Same free deal as replays — no account, no payment — but the flow is different, so here's how it goes.
You only get what airs after you press record. If you join 20 minutes in, the first 20 minutes are gone — there's no rewind for a live stream. If the beginning matters to you, start the recording as early as you can.
Long streams make big files. A single recording caps out at 8 hours. If a Space somehow runs longer than that, the recording stops there. And like everything on spkeep, the finished file deletes itself after 2 hours, so download it when it lands.
If you know when a Space is scheduled, get there early. Open spkeep, paste the link, and confirm the page shows the Space as live with the elapsed time ticking up. That check does two jobs at once: it proves the link is right, and it proves the stream is reachable from your connection before anything worth recording has aired. If the page shows a total duration instead of elapsed time, the Space has already ended — you're looking at a replay, and the regular download flow applies.
Two practical things before you press record. First, power: a three-hour Space is a three-hour browser tab. On a laptop that's nothing; on a phone, plug the charger in. Second, bandwidth: the recording itself is light, but if your connection is thin, close other tabs that are streaming video or downloading files. A stalled connection doesn't always kill the recording — reload the page and check — but a clean connection is one less thing that can go wrong while you aren't watching.
Desktop browsers are forgiving about background tabs. Phones are not. On iPhone, a Safari tab that sits in the background long enough gets suspended by the system, and a suspended tab can't keep a recording alive. On Android, battery optimization can do the same thing to a backgrounded Chrome tab. The rule from the main flow still stands — keep the browser in the foreground — but on a phone it needs active effort: set your screen timeout to its longest setting, keep the charger plugged in, and don't take a phone call on the same device mid-recording if you can avoid it, because the call pushes the browser to the background.
Check in every so often. Glance at the elapsed timer: if it's still ticking, the recording is alive. If it's frozen, or the page shows an error, reload and look — a reload tells you the truth either way. If the recording stopped, you can't recover the gap, but you can start a new recording for the remainder, and you'll have two files instead of one. That's a worse outcome than one clean file, but it's much better than nothing.
The moment the host ends the Space, the recording becomes a finished file, and everything that applied to replays starts applying to it. Download it right away — the same 2-hour deletion clock starts ticking, and a file you forget about is a file you have to re-fetch. The good news: once it's a replay, you can trim it to just the part you wanted, and your history entry lets you re-download it while the Space is still in the 24-hour cache. So even if you miss the 2-hour window, the second download is instant, as long as you come back within a day.
One more detail worth knowing: the file you get from a live recording is the same quality as a replay download. Recording doesn't re-compress anything — it captures the stream as X serves it. M4A gives you that audio untouched; MP3 gives you a smaller file with the title and host baked in as tags. Pick based on where the file is going, not on any quality worry.
If you're unsure which situation you're in, paste the link and read the info screen. A duration means replay. A ticking elapsed time means live. The page tells you before you commit to anything.
One misunderstanding worth clearing up: the 2-hour deletion clock applies to the copy on spkeep's server, not to the file on your device. Once you've downloaded it, it's an ordinary audio file — it doesn't expire, it doesn't phone home, and deleting the server copy doesn't touch yours. So the one job after a live recording ends is simple: download it, then move it somewhere you'll find it again. A file that sits in Downloads for a month is fine; a file you never downloaded because you assumed you'd grab it later is gone after two hours, and only the 24-hour history cache can bring it back.
While you're at it, play the first few seconds. A quick check now — does it start where the recording started, does it sound clean — beats discovering a problem weeks later when the server copy is long gone and the Space itself is no longer available. If something sounds wrong, the history re-download within 24 hours is your second chance; after that, the audio exists only in whatever copies people saved.
Yes. The recording lives in that tab. Close it and the recording stops with it.
You only get the audio from the moment you press record. There is no way to recover the part that already aired.
Reload the page and check — if the recording is still running, you're fine. If the page shows an error, the recording stopped, and you'll need to start a new one for the remainder.
Not while it's live. Once it ends and becomes a replay, trim works like any other replay.
Yes, same as replays — no account, no payment. The same fair-use caps and 2-hour file lifetime apply.
If the Space already ended, you don't need any of this — just follow the regular free download guide instead.
spkeep — download X Space audio without logging in. Files are auto-deleted after 2 hours.