How to Record Audio on a Mac

“Record audio on a Mac” turns out to mean four quite different jobs, and the reason so much advice is confusing is that it answers the wrong one. Recording your own voice is trivial and always has been. Recording the sound your Mac is playing is the one macOS refuses to help with.

This page covers all four, says plainly which ones are built in, and links to the detailed guide for each.

1. Recording Your Own Voice

This is the easy case, and macOS gives you two tools for it.

Voice Memos is the fastest. Open it, press the red button, press it again to stop. Recordings live in the app’s own library and sync across your devices if you use iCloud. There is minimal editing: trim the ends, replace a section, and that is about it.

QuickTime Player gives you slightly more control. Choose File > New Audio Recording, then click the chevron next to the record button to pick which microphone and what quality. It saves an .m4a wherever you tell it to.

If your voice sounds thin or distant in both, the culprit is almost always the input, not the app. Macs default to the built-in microphone, which is above the keyboard and picks up the whole room. Any USB microphone or even wired earbuds with a mic will sound dramatically better, and you select it under System Settings > Sound > Input.

2. Recording the Audio Your Mac Is Playing

Here is where it gets frustrating. There is no built-in option, in any version of macOS including macOS 26 Tahoe. QuickTime Player, Voice Memos, and the Command-Shift-5 screen recorder all capture microphone input only.

The reason is privacy. Apple treats one app reading another app’s audio as something that needs explicit consent, which is why macOS 26 has a Screen and System Audio Recording entry in Privacy and Security. Apple built the permission and the underlying APIs but never shipped an app that uses them for plain audio recording.

So you need something third-party. The three real options:

• Soundshine Record captures system audio directly using Core Audio process taps, with nothing installed into macOS. $14.99 one time.
• BlackHole is a free virtual audio driver. It works, but you have to build a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup before you can hear anything while recording.
• OBS is free and can capture system audio on macOS 13 or later, though it is a broadcast suite and the audio-only path takes some setup.

The full walkthrough for all of these, including the exact Audio MIDI Setup steps: how to record internal audio on a Mac.

3. Recording One Specific App

Sometimes you want the audio from Safari but not the Slack notification that lands halfway through. That is a different technical problem from recording everything, and most tools cannot do it.

Virtual audio drivers fundamentally cannot. By the time audio reaches an output device it has already been mixed together, so a driver sees one combined stream with no way to separate the sources.

Per-app capture needs an API that intercepts audio at the app level, which means Core Audio process taps or ScreenCaptureKit. Soundshine Record lists your running audio apps by name and lets you tick the ones you want. Audio Hijack and OBS can also do it.

4. Recording System Audio and Your Microphone Together

This is the podcast and interview case: a guest’s voice coming out of your speakers, your voice going into your microphone, both in one file.

The built-in apps record exactly one input, so they cannot do this at all. You need an app that mixes multiple sources, and the thing that matters most in practice is independent level control. Your guest arrives 12 dB quieter than you, and if the app gives you one fader for everything you cannot fix it without re-recording.

Soundshine Record gives every source its own slider and live meter, adjustable while recording. Audio Hijack does the same on a larger canvas for $69.

One thing to watch for: if you record system audio while also listening on speakers, your microphone picks up the speakers and you get an echo. Use headphones, or use an app with passthrough monitoring that routes captured apps through the recorder instead of your speakers.

Choosing a File Format

Whatever you use, you will be asked for a format.

AAC (.m4a) is the right default. It is compressed, so files are roughly a tenth the size of uncompressed audio, and at a decent bitrate the difference is inaudible for speech and music playback. Soundshine Record writes AAC at 256 kbps.

WAV and AIFF are uncompressed. Use them when the recording is raw material heading into an editor, because compressing repeatedly at each save is what actually degrades audio. They are the same thing in practice, with WAV being the more portable of the two.

A minute of 48 kHz 16-bit stereo audio is about 11 MB uncompressed and under 2 MB as AAC. For an hour-long interview that is the difference between 660 MB and 115 MB.

Going Further

• How to record internal audio on a Mac, the detailed comparison of every system audio method
• Does screen recording on a Mac record audio?, the short answer and the fix
• Screen recording on a Mac without audio, if your video came out silent
• The best audio recorders for Mac, compared honestly on price and capability
• Recording computer audio with Audacity on a Mac, for the Audacity-specific route