Two-party consent — also called all-party consent — is a rule requiring every participant in a conversation to agree before it's recorded, rather than just one of them. It sits opposite one-party consent, where only a single participant, which can be the person doing the recording, needs to agree. The name "two-party" is really shorthand for "all-party": a call with five people under an all-party rule needs agreement from all five, not just two.
Why the distinction exists
The two rules protect different things. One-party consent treats a conversation as something any participant can choose to keep a record of, the same way they could take notes by hand. All-party consent treats being recorded as something each person has a say in, regardless of who initiated the call — closer to how some places treat photographs or other personal data. Neither framing is universal, and which one applies depends entirely on where the recording happens.
How the two rules actually differ in practice
Under one-party consent, a person on a call can legally record it without announcing that, because their own agreement is enough — the rule is satisfied by the recorder being a participant, full stop. Under an all-party rule, agreement from everyone changes what "recording" safely looks like day to day: a habit that's routine and unremarkable under one framework can be the wrong side of a real rule under the other, purely because of where the call happens to be taking place.
Where "where" gets complicated
Consent rules typically attach to a jurisdiction — a state, a country — and a phone or video call can span more than one at once. A remote meeting with participants in different places can mean more than one rule is in play simultaneously, and which one governs isn't always obvious from where the call was scheduled or which platform hosted it. That's a genuinely difficult question in practice, and it's exactly the kind of question this page won't try to answer for a specific situation — see do you have to tell people you're recording for why.
What this means in practice for a meeting recorder
None of this is something a recording app can detect or enforce — software has no way to know which jurisdictions the people on a call are actually in, or which consent rule governs a specific conversation. What a recorder can do is make the underlying facts checkable: whether it captured audio at all, and where that audio went afterward. Whether the recording itself was permitted is a separate question, answered by the people on the call and, if there's real doubt, by their own counsel.
Where it matters most in this library
The professions this library writes about most carefully — lawyers recording calls that may carry privilege, and the wider set covered in meeting notes apps for regulated work — are exactly the readers for whom getting this distinction right matters most, because the cost of getting it wrong is highest. Coii AudioNotes's part in that is narrow and specific: what it captures stays on the Mac that captured it and goes nowhere else, which is covered alongside the rest of how it handles audio in Coii AudioNotes against Otter. Whether a particular call may be recorded at all is not something the app decides.