Screen recording has no audio: how to work out which part failed

There are two different sounds a screen recording can capture, and they fail for unrelated reasons. Work out which one you lost before you change any settings, because the fixes have nothing in common.

System audio is what the device itself was playing: the video, the call, the game, the notification. Microphone audio is you talking. A recording can have one, both or neither.

If your voice is there and the video's sound is missing, you have a system-audio problem. If nothing at all was captured, it is more likely a permission or input-selection problem. Those are the two branches, and the rest of this page follows them separately.

On a Mac, this is usually not a fault. The built-in screen recorder has historically had no way to capture system audio at all, so a silent recording of a video playing is the expected result rather than a broken one. The fix is a virtual audio device such as BlackHole, or a recorder like OBS that can capture application audio.

macOS 27 is reported to add native system-audio capture to the built-in recorder, so on the newest version check Options in the Command-Shift-5 toolbar before installing anything. Our full guide to Mac screen recording with audio covers each route.

On Windows, the Xbox Game Bar records system audio by default, so a silent file usually means the audio source was muted in its capture settings, or the app being recorded is one Game Bar refuses to capture. Windows also lets you enable Stereo Mix on some sound cards, which achieves the same thing as BlackHole does on a Mac.

On iPhone and Android, built-in screen recording captures internal audio by default on recent versions. If it is missing, the usual cause is an app that blocks capture of its own audio for copyright reasons. Streaming services do this deliberately and there is no setting that changes it.

This is nearly always one of three things: the microphone was never switched on for the recording, the app lacks permission to use it, or the wrong input was selected.

The microphone is off by default in several screen recorders, including the macOS Screenshot toolbar, where it sits under Options and resets more often than people expect. Check it immediately before each recording rather than assuming it held.

Permissions are the next candidate. On macOS look in System Settings under Privacy and Security, then Microphone, and confirm the recording app is listed and enabled. On Windows, Settings then Privacy and Security then Microphone. A recording app that was working last month can lose this after an update.

Wrong input is the quiet one. If a headset, an interface or a virtual device is selected as the input and you spoke into the laptop, the recording is of a microphone nobody was near. This is also what happens after a BlackHole session if the system input was never switched back.

Record ten seconds, play something with sound, say a sentence out loud, stop, and play it back. This catches every cause above before you commit to a long recording.

It sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, which is why silent forty-minute recordings are as common as they are. The failure modes here are all silent in the literal sense: nothing warns you, the file is produced normally, and you find out afterwards.

If you record screens regularly, make the test part of the ritual rather than something you do when you are suspicious.

Audio that was never captured cannot be recovered. There is no repair tool for this, and software promising to extract sound from a silent video is selling something that cannot work.

What can sometimes be saved: if you recorded the microphone but it was very quiet, the signal is there and can be raised. Quiet is recoverable. Absent is not. A file with a flat silent waveform has nothing in it.

If the visuals are the valuable part and the sound is gone, recording a voiceover over the existing video is usually faster than staging the whole thing again. Play the recording back, narrate what is happening, and lay the new audio over it.

That is straightforward to do in the browser with Hilite, which we make, and equally possible in any editor you already have.