How to record audio on a computer

Open the Start menu and type Sound Recorder. On older builds the same app is called Voice Recorder. Either way it is already there and needs no setup.

Pick your input device from the microphone selector before you record, especially if you have a headset or interface connected. Press the record button, speak, and press stop. You can add markers while recording, which is genuinely useful on anything long.

Recordings are listed inside the app and saved into a Sound recordings folder in your Documents. In the app's settings you can change the recording format and quality; higher quality settings give you a larger file with more to work with in an edit.

If nothing is captured, the cause is almost always permissions rather than hardware. Windows has both a system-wide microphone switch and a per-app one, and an app can be blocked while the microphone itself works fine everywhere else.

Voice Memos is the simpler one. Open it from Applications, press the red button and talk. Recordings sync to your iPhone and iPad if Voice Memos is turned on in iCloud, which is either exactly what you want or a surprise, depending on what you are recording.

QuickTime Player is the other. Open it, choose File and then New Audio Recording, and use the arrow beside the record button to pick your input and quality. QuickTime saves a file straight to a folder you choose, which makes it the better option when you want a normal file rather than a library entry.

Voice Memos keeps recordings inside the app rather than as loose files, so exporting is an extra step. Our guide to where Voice Memos are saved covers getting a real file out of it.

Browsers have been able to record a microphone for years. Open a recording site, allow the microphone when prompted, and record. This works identically on Windows, Mac, Linux and ChromeOS, which makes it the obvious answer on a locked-down work machine or a Chromebook where you cannot install anything.

It is also the route with the shortest distance between recording and doing something with the recording, since editing usually lives in the same place. There is more detail in our guide to recording audio in Chrome, including the permission checks when nothing records.

Distance. Get closer to the microphone than feels natural, around a hand's width. Every doubling of distance brings more room and less voice, and no software fixes a recording made from across a desk.

The room. Hard walls, bare floors and a large empty space are what make a recording sound hollow. A room with a rug, curtains and a sofa sounds dramatically better than a kitchen, and costs nothing.

Level. Aim for the meter to sit comfortably below the top on your loudest moments. Recording too hot causes clipping, which cannot be undone; recording a little quiet can be raised afterwards at no cost.

Interruptions. Close anything that plays sound, silence notifications, and turn off fans. A laptop fan spinning up mid-sentence is the single most common ruin of an otherwise good take.

A laptop's built-in microphone sits inches from a fan, points at the ceiling, and is tuned for conference calls rather than recording. It is fine for a note to yourself and noticeably weak for anything other people will hear.

The cheapest real improvement is usually a headset or a wired pair of earphones with a microphone, because it puts the capsule near your mouth and away from the machine. That change alone does more than any amount of processing.

A USB microphone is the next step up and does not need an interface or any other equipment. You do not need to spend much before the room, rather than the microphone, becomes the limiting factor.

Trim the silence off both ends first. Almost every recording starts with fumbling for the button and ends the same way, and removing that is the single biggest improvement available in ten seconds.

Then take the room out with a noise reducer and set a consistent level with a normalizer. In that order: raising the level of a noisy recording raises the noise with it.

If whatever you are uploading to rejects the file, convert it to MP3. Most platforms accept it, and converting takes seconds.