Mac screen recording with audio: how to capture system sound

Press Command-Shift-5, start a screen recording, play a video, and the resulting file is silent. The picture is there. The sound the Mac was making is not. Every other part of the recording worked, which is what makes this so consistently confusing.

The reason is architectural rather than an oversight. The screen recorder captures video from the display and audio from an input device, and your speakers are an output device. macOS has historically offered no supported route from an output back into a recorder, so there is nothing for the recorder to point at.

The microphone option in that menu does not solve it either. Recording the microphone while sound plays through speakers gives you room audio: the video's sound bouncing off your desk, mixed with your keyboard and whatever is happening outside. It is not the clean internal signal you were after.

The Screenshot toolbar at Command-Shift-5 records the screen or a selected portion of it, and under Options lets you choose a microphone. No system audio.

QuickTime Player's New Screen Recording is the same capture path with a different interface, and has the same limitation. Its New Audio Recording captures a microphone only.

Voice Memos records the microphone. Nothing in the standard install captures the audio your Mac is sending to its speakers. If you have found a page claiming a hidden setting for this, it is describing an older macOS, a third-party driver, or it is wrong.

This is worth being clear about because a great deal of time gets lost hunting for a checkbox that does not exist.

The standard fix is to install a virtual audio device: a piece of software that appears to macOS as both an output and an input. You send sound to it as though it were speakers, and a recorder reads from it as though it were a microphone. BlackHole is the common free choice, and Loopback is the paid one with a friendlier interface.

The catch is that once sound is going to the virtual device, it is not going to your actual speakers, so you cannot hear what you are recording. The fix is a Multi-Output Device, built in Audio MIDI Setup, which sends the same signal to both your speakers and the virtual device at once.

That is three pieces of setup before you record anything: install the driver, build the multi-output device, then remember to switch your system output back afterwards. It works reliably once configured. It is simply more ceremony than most people expect for pressing record.

One practical warning: leave your system output set to the multi-output device and you will eventually join a call wondering why nobody can hear the other person properly. Switch back when you are done.

OBS Studio is free, cross-platform, and built for exactly this: multiple video and audio sources captured to one file. On macOS it can capture application audio directly on recent versions, which removes the virtual-device step for a lot of cases.

It is more program than a one-off recording needs. Scenes, sources, audio mixer, encoder settings. If you are recording your screen weekly it repays the afternoon it takes to learn. If you need one clip today, it is a lot of interface between you and a file.

Commercial screen recorders occupy the middle ground and bundle the system-audio capture into an installer, which is most of what you are paying for.

macOS 27, Golden Gate, is due in mid-September 2026, and reporters covering the beta have said it adds system-audio capture to the built-in screen recorder for the first time. Filipe Esposito noted it directly, remarking that it is strange this was not already possible.

Treat that as reported rather than as something Apple has put in a support document. Apple's own screen-recording page still describes microphone capture only at the time of writing. If it holds, the workflow becomes: Command-Shift-5, choose system audio in Options, record. No driver, no multi-output device, no OBS.

It also means most of what you will find written about this problem, including large parts of this page, describes a workaround for something the operating system is about to handle. If you are on macOS 27 or later, check the Options menu in the Screenshot toolbar before installing anything.

If you are on macOS 26 or earlier, or you need the recording today, the BlackHole route above is still the answer.

A screen recording with system audio is usually the first half of the job. If you are also talking over it, you now have two sources at very different levels: a video at whatever loudness it was mastered at, and your voice at whatever distance you sat from the microphone.

Recording those to a single mixed track means you cannot fix the balance later. Where your tool allows it, record system audio and microphone as separate tracks and set the relationship afterwards. OBS does this. The built-in recorder does not.

If the recording is mostly you talking and the screen is illustration, the voice is the thing worth getting right: a microphone closer than your laptop's, a room with something soft in it, and a pass to take out the noise floor and the pauses.

Hilite handles that last part in the browser. We make it, so weigh the recommendation accordingly. Capture the screen with whichever tool above suits you, then bring the audio somewhere that can clean it up and level it before it goes out.