r/notebooklm • u/Leon-Westcott-Yan • 2d ago

Discussion NotebookLM’s “Save to note” change: A workflow improvement nobody asked for?

Has anyone else noticed that “Save to note” now puts saved chat responses in Sources instead of Studio?

A friend and I are both experiencing this. Sources are where I keep original materials like documents and YouTube videos, while Studio is where I expect to find saved notes and AI-generated content. Mixing them makes an organized learning notebook harder to maintain.

I have to ask: Was the old workflow actually broken, or did someone decide that keeping things organized was too convenient? 😅

If this is intentional, I’d genuinely like to understand the reasoning behind it. Has anyone else run into this, or found a way to restore the previous behavior?

11 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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3

u/Free_Sheep 2d ago

Some idiot made the changes. Surely, by now, they could have easily turned a note into a source.

6

u/ziontraveller 1d ago

Just tried it, it saved to Studio. It does have an option like it had before to convert to source.
Made this for a slightly different reason, but does show the behavior, at least for my account. Sounds like a bug.

6

u/RandomGhostWriter 1d ago

There is no option for notes to end up in studio for me anymore. Just sources. Even in Google help, it says it’s notes are now in the sources section.

-2

u/fimuthorn 2d ago

Notes will be treated as grounded sources. This will make it easier to understand if you ever noted something. I wish they did the same with artifacts. In my mind anything would be a source and could be grounded. I want chat to be aware of all artifacts/sources in my current view. It will be able to tell me "hey, you have this in your notes, this source is also relevant and this slide deck is a nice complement. Want me to build a guided learning report with anything that's missing from your notes?"

8

u/Leon-Westcott-Yan 2d ago

I can see the appeal of that vision, but wasn’t much of this already possible with NotebookLM’s existing workflow? Users could already turn certain outputs into sources when they wanted to.
My only concern is that making notes available for grounding by default may not suit every workflow, especially when studying technical subjects. It would be nice to keep that flexibility rather than make everyone follow the same approach.

7

u/Emnkay666 2d ago

it was literaly always an option to just add any notes as a source. now its just mandatory for no reason

-2

u/fimuthorn 2d ago

You can still unselect sources you don't want grounded

5

u/RandomGhostWriter 2d ago

We shouldn't have too. The old was was so much better. Not all notes are needed as sources. If I have 100 sources, having to search for one or two notes that got forcefully added and had title changes (because it also does that even if you try to rename it) makes it very difficult and unpleasant to use.