You’ve likely found yourself in this position more than once: Your Mac is playing audio that you’d love a permanent copy of, but the application you’re using doesn’t provide a way to do that. While you could turn to one of the few commercial Mac applications that perform this task, there’s a way to go about it that won’t cost you a nickel. In this Macworld Video I show you how.
Transcript
Which Audio Editor Do I Use? Audacity (Windows, Mac, Linux) This is the godfather of free audio editing software. You can multi track to an extent (have more than just one stereo track e.g. A full band recording). QuickTime can easily capture sound input from a microphone and save it as a lightweight m4a file, making it perfect for recording quick voice notes, capturing conversations, recording sound effects, making simple ringtones, or whatever other possible reason you’d like to record some audio. Award-winning audio recording software for recording sound on PC or Mac. Download free. Audio recorder programs to record mp3, music, voice, sound and audio. Browse and download a wide variety of award-winning video, audio, business, utility, or graphics software programs for both PC and Mac. Free Downloads.
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A simple sound recording application which uses QuickTime. Launch it, setup the Microphone and record to a QuickTime Movie file. Carols needles for sound design. What new: Now an universal binary application.
Best Audio Recorder Software For Mac
Today I’m going to show you how to capture sound produced by your Mac for free.
The first thing you need is a copy of Cycling 74’s Soundflower, which you can get from cycling74.com. Install Soundflower and, if asked to, restart your Mac.
Now move to System Preferences, select the Sound preference, and in the Input and Output tabs, select Soundflower (2 channel). Doing this takes the audio playing on your Mac and routes into the Mac’s audio input circuitry, allowing you to then capture it.
To perform the capture, launch QuickTime Player, choose New Audio Recording from the File menu, and in the window that appears, make sure that SoundFlower is selected by clicking on the small triangle. In the Audio area below you have two options—High and Maximum. Both produce an AAC file encoded at 256 kbps. The difference is that High quality records at a resolution of 44.1 kHz and Maximum records at a higher quality of 48 kHz. Setting default app for mac.
One thing you’ll immediately notice as you record is the sound of silence. You see movement in QuickTime’s meters but hear nothing from your Mac’s speakers. And that’s because the Mac’s audio is routed to Soundflower rather than your Mac’s speakers or headphones.
To hear what your Mac is recording, launch Soundflowerbed, which the Soundflower installed places inside the SoundFlower folder now inside your Applications folder. A new menu will appear in the Mac’s menu bar. Click on it and choose the output you’d like to monitor from—headphones jacked into the Mac’s headphone port, for example.
Now go about your capture and when you’re finished, click QuickTime Player’s Stop button. Close the window to name and save it as an audio file. This will save your recording as a 256kbps AAC file.
And that’s it, capturing your Mac’s audio on the cheap.
Now playing:Watch this: Record your computer's screen with audio on a Mac
If you own a modern Mac, there is a screen recorder built-in the QuickTime Player X app. QuickTime can record whatever you have displayed on screen, including video playing on websites. To make a screen recording, find and open QuickTime Player X in your Applications folder, click 'File,' then 'New Screen Recording.'
By default, you have limited options on what you can use as an audio source. On a laptop, you're looking at the options of 'Built-in Microphone' and 'None.'
When a situation arises where you want to record the audio along with your screen recoding on your Mac, you could try raising the volume on your speakers and hope that a built-in microphone captures that audio, but that's far from elegant.
Audio Recorder App For Free
Instead, you can use Soundflower. It is a free piece of software for Mac OS X by Cycling74 that will let you route system audio within your Mac. Download and install the utility; Soundflower requires you reboot your system after installation for it to work.
Audio Recorder App For Pc
After your machine reboots, open QuickTime Player and start a new screen recording. In the QuickTime Player window, click the down arrow to the right of the record button and select 'Soundflower (2ch)' as your input. Then launch System Preferences and go to the Sound settings. Go to the Output tab and select the same 'Soundflower (2ch)' option as you did in QuickTime Player.
What this does is route all of your system audio out to Soundflower as if the utility were speakers or headphones. That means any sound made by your Mac (including Facebook notifications or similar) will be recorded by QuickTime Player.
Now you can hit record in QuickTime Player and you'll capture both the video and audio in one recording. While this is going on, you won't be able to hear the audio to monitor what's being recorded. When you're done, change your output audio back to your original settings in System Preferences.
In our video How To, we recorded a video clip from a larger work called 'Le Mondial Du Tatouage - Paris 2014' by Hadrien Genest available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
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