How To Record Your Mac Screen With Audio (2026)

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can pretty easily record your Mac's screen with your Mac's internal audio as well. 

I've done a few videos in the past that teach you how to record your Mac's screen but also get the internal audio. Without that the only audio you get is from your Mac's microphone, if you have that selected. So you can narrate what's going on on your screen but if the things that you're showing actually have their own audio, like music making software or a video that you're playing back, it won't record those into the video unless they happen to be playing through the speakers and your mic picks them up which isn't going to get you good quality. So today you don't really need a third party extension to be able to record the audio that your Mac is generating. You can do it but you will need a third party app. The app that I'm going to show here is OBS Studio. You'll find it at OBS Project.com. This app has been around for a long time. A lot of people use this app, not just on Macs but on Windows and Linux for streaming video. In fact I use this app when I stream live versions of MacMost to YouTube. You can also use it for screen recording and its screen recording isn't limited to the audio from the microphone. Let me show you how to get it. 

First you go to OBS Project.com and you use macOS, of course, and you use Apple's silicone version provided you've got a M1 Mac or newer. There's also a version for older Macs. So you're going to download it, like that, and then it is a fairly straight forward third party download. Install. It will go to your Download Folder or wherever you have download set to go. Then you'll open it up and it gives you the old Drag & Drop install. It gives you a shortcut to the Applications Folder and you can drag the app to it. It is the same as opening up the Applications Folder in another window and dragging the app to it. Once you've got it installed you run it just like you would run any other app. I'll install here in Spotlight and then you run it. 

Now the first time you run it it's going to ask for permission. It needs permission to record your screen, to record from your camera, to use your microphone, and so on. So just go through the steps and grant permissions. You'll at least need screen recording, of course, in order to record your screen. But you'll probably need all of them if you want to play around with more of the features of OBS Studio. Now you can have multiple profiles so you can have one setup, for instance, for streaming. One setup for recording tutorials, one setup for something else. So you can customize how OBS works in the different situations. We're just going to setup a default one here for screen recording. So I want to optimize for Recording, not steaming in this case, and then I want to go and set the resolution the same as my display. So I get a screen recording that matches the display pixels. For frames per second you can leave it at the default or you can set it for a hard 30 if you want. 

Now once all that is complete you've got a basic profile here with one scene in it. You can have multiple scenes. Imagine, for instance, if you were recording a video and you want a scene with you on camera, another scene with the screen, another scene maybe with a second camera from the side. That kind of thing. But here we're just recording the screen so we just need this one scene here. Now, the scene has to have some sources. The only source it needs is the screen. So we're going to click the Plus Button here and add macOS Screen Capture. You can add macOS audio capture and that would capture the audio on your Mac without the screen. But, Screen Capture will capture the screen and you'll also capture your Mac's audio. Now we're going to click the Plus Button here and notice that I can with Display Capture, Window Capturer, or Application Capture. Similar to how you might capture using the built-in tool. We'll capture the entire display and we will choose the main display here. We'll choose Yes Show the Cursor and we will choose Hide OBS from capture. So we don't see OBS, we see what's behind it and it won't kind of get in the way. Then we click Okay. 

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Now we have macOS Screen Capture. Now notice here under audio mixer we've got our microphone and it is recording that. Now if you want to record your microphone while you're doing the screen capture then leave this alone. Otherwise you can simply just mute this. Bring the line all the way down like that or maybe you want just a low microphone capture. It's up to you. Then you've got the volume for the screen capture. This is what is going to record the audio as well as the video. You're going to want to test this out. If it's working we should have something going on here when we have audio playing on our Mac. So, let's start off by going to System Settings here and then we're going to go down to Sound. I'm going to play the Alert Sound. Let's watch this meter carefully. You can see, that indeed, shows that it is capturing the audio. Let's go for an even better test. I'm going to go to Quick Time Player and open up Quick Time Player and I've got the video playing here. You can see it here it being part of the Screen Capture. If I play this it should capture the audio from that. (audio playing). So you can see it was indeed capturing the music in the background of this video.

So now our next step is to setup what happens when we record. We've got Settings right here at the bottom right corner and we want to go to Output. We've got Streaming and Recording Output. We are Recording so let's check that out. Recording Path is where the video was saved to. So, it is now going to the Movies Folder. You can browse and select another location if you like. You've also got Recording Quality, Recording Format, like for instance let's just set it to a straight forward intake for filing. You've got Video Encoder. You probably have different options there depending on your Mac. Audio Encoder as well. So you've got a bunch of different things you can customize. It is not really needed to customize any of them just to get started here. But do note where your recording path is so you know where to find the video. 

Now we'll close the settings here and we'll give this a try. I'm going to start recording and then I'm going to play the video a bit. But I'm also going to go into GarageBand and play something live just so you can see it recording the audio being generated on the fly. (recording). Now I'll stop recording like that. So now I'll hide OBS and I'll hide the Quick Time Video here and I'll look inside of Finder, my Home Folder, and Movies and there is the video. I'm going to double click it and it will open in Quick Time Player here. I can see I captured there the video playing, me going over to GarageBand and most importantly I can test it out to see whether or not it got the audio. (testing audio). There you go. A simple straight forward way to install just this one third party app that is well known and well trusted and being able to record your screen now with audio with any video you play with sound effects inside of apps.

Do note you still might not be able to record audio in some situations especially when there is some sort of protection on video being played back, like in the TV app or on a streaming service. So you can't and really shouldn't use this to get around copyright. But for recording what it is you're doing on your Mac and having the sound as a part of it, it's great. Plus OBS can be used for so much more. There is a lot to explore there. You can record your camera at the same time. You can have different scenes that arrange different elements and have titles and graphics and all of that, all in a live environment. You can stream that out live, for instance, over YouTube. So it is a really popular app for doing that. So once you get OBS working for this you may want to experiment doing other things with it as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.