How to Screen Record on Mac With Audio

Recording your Mac screen takes one keyboard shortcut. Recording it with the right audio is where people get stuck, because macOS treats your microphone and the sound your computer is playing as two completely different problems. One is built in and takes a single click. The other is not supported at all by Apple's own recorder, and no amount of hunting through the menus will find it.

This guide covers both, and then the part most tutorials leave out: what to do about the audio once you have it, because a first take almost never sounds good enough to publish.

What macOS will and will not record

The built-in screen recorder captures microphone audio. It does not capture system audio, meaning the sound coming out of your speakers from a video, a call, a game, or a browser tab.

This is deliberate, not a bug or a missing setting. macOS keeps each application's audio isolated from every other application as a privacy measure, so a screen recorder cannot listen to what another app is playing. Capturing system audio requires routing that audio somewhere the recorder is allowed to hear.

Check your permissions first

Recordings that come out silent or as a black rectangle are usually a permissions problem rather than a settings one. Open System Settings, go to Privacy and Security, and check two entries:

Screen and System Audio Recording: the app doing the recording must be listed and enabled.
Microphone: enable it for the same app if you intend to record your voice.

Changes here often require the app to be quit and reopened before they take effect. If you granted permission and it still fails, close the app completely and try again.

Method 1: the Screenshot toolbar

This is the fastest route and needs nothing installed.

Press Command, Shift and 5 together. A small toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen.
Choose Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion. For a selection, drag out the area you want.
Click Options. Under Microphone, pick the microphone you want to use. If it is set to None, your recording will have no sound at all.
Still in Options, set Save to if you do not want the file on your Desktop, and turn on Show Mouse Clicks if you are demonstrating something.
Click Record. To stop, click the stop button in the menu bar or press Command, Control and Escape.

Tip: Do a ten-second test recording and play it back before recording anything long. The single most common mistake is leaving Microphone set to None and discovering it after a twenty-minute take.

Method 2: QuickTime Player

QuickTime does the same job with a slightly different interface, and it is the better choice when you want to save straight to a specific location or you plan to trim the result immediately.

Open QuickTime Player, then choose File and New Screen Recording.
On recent versions of macOS this opens the same Screenshot toolbar described above.
Set your microphone under Options, then record.
When you stop, the recording opens in QuickTime, where Edit and then Trim removes dead air from the start and end.

Recording system audio: the free workaround

To capture what your Mac is playing, you install a virtual audio device. It appears to macOS as a sound card, so audio sent to it can be picked up as an input. BlackHole is the usual free choice.

Install a virtual audio driver such as BlackHole and restart your Mac so macOS registers it.
Open Audio MIDI Setup, found in Applications and then Utilities.
Create a Multi-Output Device and tick both your normal speakers or headphones and the virtual device. This is what lets you hear the audio while it is also being captured.
Set that Multi-Output Device as your system output in Sound settings.
In the Screenshot toolbar or QuickTime, set Microphone to the virtual device.
Record. The audio your Mac plays is now captured.

Skip the Multi-Output step and you will record perfectly good audio while hearing nothing at all through your speakers. That is the expected behaviour, not a fault: routing output to the virtual device alone sends it to the recorder instead of to you.

If you want both your voice and the system audio in one recording, you need an Aggregate Device that combines your microphone and the virtual device. Remember to set your output back to your normal speakers when you are done, or you will wonder why nothing plays sound afterwards.

Cleaning up the audio afterwards

A raw screen recording rarely sounds ready to publish. Laptop microphones pick up fan noise and room tone, narration recorded while you concentrate is usually too quiet and uneven, and app audio is often much louder than your voice. All of that is fixable, and none of it requires a video editor.

Start by pulling the audio out of the recording. A screen recording is a MOV file, and the audio extractor takes the sound out of it as a standalone file you can work on.

Extract the audio track from a MOV, MP4, MKV, AVI or WebM screen recording.

Open the audio extractor →

Then work through it in this order, because each step makes the next one behave better:

Noise reduction, to take out the steady fan hum and room tone. Do this first: compression applied before noise reduction amplifies the hiss in the gaps and makes it harder to remove.
Compression, to even out the difference between your loud and quiet passages. Speech recorded at a natural distance varies a lot, and this is what makes narration sit consistently in headphones and phone speakers alike.
Volume, to bring the whole thing back up. Compression only turns peaks down, so the result always needs raising afterwards.
Convert to MP3 if you are publishing the audio on its own, or keep it as WAV if you are putting it back into a video editor.

Fixing specific problems

There is no audio in the recording

Microphone was set to None, or the app lacks microphone permission. If you were trying to record system audio, the Mac was not routed through a virtual device. Neither can be recovered after the fact, so the take has to be redone.

My voice is buried under the app audio

Lower the system volume before recording rather than trying to fix the balance later. Once both are in one mono track they cannot be separated. If it is only slightly off, compression followed by a volume lift will pull the quieter voice up.

The audio echoes or doubles

Two sources are capturing the same sound: usually a microphone picking up your speakers while the virtual device also captures them. Wear headphones. Noise reduction cannot fix this, because echo is not steady background noise.

There is a constant hiss or hum

This is exactly what noise reduction is for, since it is continuous and has a stable profile. Start around 40 to 50 per cent and listen to the pauses between words, where artefacts show up first.

Remove steady fan noise, hum and hiss from a screen recording's audio track.

Open the noise remover →

One thing this site cannot do for you

The voice recorder here captures your microphone through the browser, and it is genuinely useful for narration you intend to lay over a screen recording. It cannot record your screen, and it cannot record system audio, because a browser has no access to either. Use the macOS tools above for the capture, and the tools here for everything that happens to the audio afterwards.

The short version

Command, Shift, 5 records the screen, and the Microphone option under Options records your voice.
macOS will not capture system audio by itself. Install a virtual audio device and a Multi-Output Device so you can hear it too.
Check Screen and System Audio Recording plus Microphone permissions before blaming the settings.
Always do a ten-second test take.
Clean the audio in the order noise, compression, volume, then convert.