How to Screen Record on a Mac With Audio

Almost everyone who searches for this has just hit the same wall: you recorded your screen, played it back, and the video is silent — or it has your voice but none of the sound your Mac was actually making.

That's not a bug, and it's not a setting you missed. There are two completely different kinds of audio in a screen recording, and macOS only handles one of them.

Microphone audio is your voice, picked up by a mic. macOS records this happily.

System audio — also called internal audio, computer audio, or desktop audio — is the sound your Mac is producing: a video playing, a call, a notification, a product that beeps. macOS does not record this at all.

This is true of both built-in tools. Press Shift + Command + 5 to open the Screenshot toolbar, click Options, and the only audio choice is a microphone. Open QuickTime Player and choose File → New Screen Recording, and the Record button's dropdown offers exactly the same thing: a list of microphones. Neither one has an option for the sound coming out of your Mac.

It's a long-standing gap rather than an oversight in your setup. macOS Tahoe 26 added window-specific recording and HDR capture to the Screenshot toolbar, and still doesn't offer system audio.

So if you point a microphone at the problem — turning your speakers up and letting the mic hear them — you get a thin, echoey recording with your room in it. To capture system audio properly, the sound has to be routed digitally, never through the air. There are two ways to do that, and the rest of this page covers both.

The direct route is to record with an app that treats system audio as a first-class input. Here's the whole process in Tella:

Step 1: Record your screen, your voice, and your Mac's audio

Download the Tella Mac app and drag it to your Applications folder. It runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Choose what you want to capture — your whole screen, a single window, or a dragged area — and pick your microphone. Then enable system audio in the recording controls. That's the switch that captures everything your Mac is playing, with no virtual audio driver to install and nothing to reroute in System Settings.

You can record your camera at the same time, and Tella keeps the screen and camera as separate streams rather than baking a fixed webcam bubble into the video. macOS will ask for Screen Recording permission the first time; if recording fails later, that's the first thing to check under System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Step 2: Rebalance the audio and clean up the take

When you stop, the recording opens straight in the editor — and this is where capturing system audio as its own track pays off. Your microphone and your Mac's audio arrive as two independent sources, so if the video you were reacting to drowned out your narration, you can turn one down without touching the other. Mixed-into-one-track recordings can't be fixed this way.

From there, trim the false start, cut the mistakes, add zooms and a background, and generate subtitles so the video still makes sense with the sound off.

Step 3: Share it as a link

Tella renders as you go, so you can copy a share link as soon as you stop rather than waiting on an export. Lock it to your workspace, put a password on it, or leave it open to anyone with the link. If you need the file itself, export an MP4 — or an audio-only .m4a if it was the sound you were after all along.

If you'd rather not install a recorder, you can make QuickTime capture system audio using a free virtual audio driver. The catch is that you're building the plumbing yourself.

A virtual audio device is a fake output that other apps can record from. You send your Mac's sound into it, then record it as though it were a microphone. BlackHole is the free, open-source one most people use; Soundflower is its abandoned predecessor and no longer worth installing.

The setup

1. Install BlackHole (the 2ch version is right for this).
2. Open Audio MIDI Setup from Applications → Utilities.
3. Click the + in the bottom-left corner and choose Create Multi-Output Device.
4. Tick your normal speakers or headphones first, then BlackHole 2ch. Including your real output is what lets you still hear the audio while it records, and the order matters: your physical output has to sit at the top of the list as the clock device. If BlackHole ends up first, audio and video may not play at all — untick and retick it to move it down. Switch on Drift Correction for everything below the top device.
5. In System Settings → Sound, set your output to that Multi-Output Device.
6. In QuickTime, choose File → New Screen Recording, open the Options menu, and pick BlackHole 2ch as the microphone.
7. Record. When you're finished, set your sound output back to your speakers.

What this costs you

It works, and for a one-off capture with no narration it's a perfectly reasonable answer. But it's worth knowing what you're signing up for.

Your microphone slot is now occupied by BlackHole, so QuickTime captures your Mac's audio or your voice, never both. The usual advice — go back into Audio MIDI Setup and build an Aggregate Device combining your mic and BlackHole — doesn't do what it sounds like. An Aggregate Device stacks its devices as consecutive channels rather than mixing them, so your mic lands on channels 1 and 2 and BlackHole on 3 and 4. QuickTime has no channel picker and records the first two, which leaves you with the microphone on its own. Capturing both means moving to a recorder that can map channels — Audacity, GarageBand or OBS — and mixing them down yourself.

The volume keys also stop working while a Multi-Output Device is selected, so you're setting levels per-app or in Audio MIDI Setup. And you have to remember to switch your output back, or every other app on your Mac keeps playing through the recording rig.

Yes, and it's the most common thing people actually want: narrating over something that itself makes noise — a demo, a call, a video you're reacting to, a slide deck with a clip in it.

Natively, you can't. macOS gives you the microphone or nothing, so your voice records and the Mac's own audio doesn't.

With BlackHole you can get there, but not in QuickTime. An Aggregate Device stacks your mic and BlackHole as separate channels instead of mixing them, and QuickTime records only the first two, so what you get back is the microphone and nothing else. You need a recorder that can map channels — Audacity, GarageBand or OBS — and then you're mixing the two down yourself, which decides the balance at record time rather than leaving it open afterwards.

Recording both as separate tracks is the thing worth holding out for. In Tella, select your microphone and enable system audio and the two are captured independently, so the balance between your narration and your Mac's audio stays adjustable after the fact instead of being decided the moment you hit record.

One small gotcha to know: if your camera is on, a microphone has to be selected before recording will start. Screen-only recordings don't need one.

This question comes up constantly, and it's really the same problem in disguise.

When you wear headphones, the sound goes into your ears and nowhere near your microphone. A recording that was relying on the mic to pick up your speakers now captures nothing at all — which is why headphones so often turn a recording that "sort of worked" into a silent one.

The fix isn't a different microphone or a louder setting. It's capturing system audio digitally, exactly as described above, at which point headphones stop mattering: the sound is taken from inside your Mac before it ever reaches your ears. You can wear headphones, use AirPods, or unplug entirely and the recording is identical.

Headphones also solve the opposite problem. Recording your voice through a mic while your speakers play audio out loud gives you that audio twice — once digitally and once through the room, slightly out of sync. Wearing headphones keeps your speakers silent and your narration clean.

All three record a screen. They differ in what happens to the audio, and in what you're left holding when you stop.

The built-in tools are genuinely good at what they do. For a silent capture, or a quick clip where your voice is the only sound that matters, Shift + Command + 5 is the fastest thing on the machine and you should just use it.

They stop being the right tool the moment the sound coming out of your Mac is part of the point — or when you'd rather not finish a recording by hunting for somewhere to upload a .mov file that's too big to email.

Tella is the all-in-one screen recorder for Mac, Windows, and Chrome. For the full macOS walkthrough, see the Mac screen recorder; to compare your options, read what's the best screen recorder for Mac or browse the screen recorder alternatives.

Recording somewhere else? There are guides for capturing Chrome with audio, a Chromebook with audio, and Windows 11 with audio.