12/15/20
9:00 am

How To Record Your Mac Screen With Audio

You can use the open source BlackHole audio driver extension to record your screen with audio in macOS Big Sur. I'll show you how to set it up, hear the audio over your speakers while recording, and even mix microphone and internal computer audio with level control.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to record your Mac screen and also capture the internal audio from whatever apps are playing sound or music.. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 800 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now when I do my screen captures I'm using a professional tool, in my case ScreenFlow, and that will capture the audio from the computer as well as from my microphone. But if you don't have the money for a pro tool like that you can use some third party utilities so you can do regular screen captures while capturing your computers audio at the same time. Now I've shared another tool in the past but people have been saying it's not working quite well with Big Sur and it doesn't look like it's going to be supported in the future. So instead, this time, I'm going to show you how to use something called BlackHole. You get it from existential.audio/blackhole. It's an open source tool but to get an easy installer for the Mac you just give them your name and email address. Then you get an email with a link that will allow you to download the installer. Now you actually have a choice between two downloads. I chose the simple two channel version instead of the sixteen channel version.
So once you have the installer you just double click it to run and walk through the steps. Now you're ready to try capturing. You don't have to setup anything special to do a simple capture of the audio. All you need to do is go to System Preferences and then go to Sound. Change your Output from whatever your normal output is, in this case external headphones for me on my MacPro. For you it might say MacBook Speakers, or iMac Speakers. Whatever your normal output is. Note what that is but then switch it to BlackHole. Now this will route your computer sound output, instead of to your speakers, to this extension. So you won't hear anything from this point on. Your speakers won't play any sound. But now you can actually record using this as an input. So the sound is going to BlackHole and BlackHole acts like a microphone input when you try to do a screen recording. So I'm going to do Shift Command 5 to open up the screen recording tools. I'm going to select Record Entire Screen and under Options, if I look at the microphones here, I can see BlackHole is now listed. I'll choose that as the microphone. Now I can start recording. So I'll start recording here and I'll bring up Safari again but this time with a YouTube video playing. I don't hear anything. It's completely silent. The sound is going right from the video into BlackHole and then into the screen recording. So when I'm done I'll stop the screen recording by clicking here and then I've got the video that I've captured. Now to hear it I'm going to have to switch my audio output back to my speakers.
So I'll go in System Preferences, Sound, and then I'll go back to External Headphones. Now here's that screen recording. I'll open it up and when I go to the part where the video is playing and I play it (macOS Big Sur) I can hear it recorded the audio. Now this might be enough for your needs. But you can go even further than this. There's an app on your Mac called Audio MIDI Setup. I'm just going to do a Spotlight search for Audio MIDI Setup and run it. You could see here one of the audio devices is now BlackHole 2 Channel. Let's go and add some more devices here. The first one I'm going to add is a multi-output device. I'm going to click this Plus button here and do Multi-Output Device and it allows me to choose more than one output at the same time. So I'm going to choose my External Headphones as one and I'm going to choose as the other one BlackHole. So now when I choose these as the output devices the sound will go to two places. My speakers and into BlackHole. Now I can choose this multi-output device instead of BlackHole and I'll be able to hear the sound of the speakers and it will still capture to the screen recording. I can name this anything I want. So I'm going to click here and rename this BH, for BlackHole plus Speakers. 
Now I could go to System Preferences and choose this as the sound output. You can see it appears there. An easier way, since you're already here in Audio MIDI Setup, is to Control click here and then say use this device for sound output. That will do the same thing. You can check in System Preferences it will show that it has been changed. Now let's bring Safari up again and if I start playing I'll hear it over the speakers. For recording I'm still going to record from BlackHole 2 Channel. Now I'm going to hit Record and It's going to record while I can still hear it over my speakers. So let's stop it here and I'll stop the recording. Now here is the recording and if I play it I can hear that I did get the audio. 
So let's take it a step further. What if we still wanted to record the microphone even though we're recording the internal audio at the same time. To do that we can use the Plus button here and create an aggregate device. So think of multi-output as output and aggregate device as input. I'll create the aggregate device and I'm going to have two inputs for this. Input 1 will be BlackHole. Input 2 will be my microphone. Now I have a lot of devices and things and cameras hooked up but the simple microphone I have hooked up here is the AT2020. There's output and input because this microphone also has a monitor on it but I'll choose the Input one. So now I've got BlackHole and my microphone both coming into this aggregate device. Let's name this one BlackHole Plus Mic. Now we can go back to get ready to screen record again. But this time when I go to Capture I'm going to change the option from BlackHole 2 Channel to my new aggregate device BlackHole Plus Mic. Now I can start recording and I can play the video and I'm capturing the audio from the video and also the microphone and I can hear the audio at the same time. Which may not be ideal depending upon your situation. So let's stop that and stop recording and now I can check it here and I can see that I've got both the audio from the video here and my microphone.
Now there's one more thing I want to show you. How about volume control. If you look at the inputs here your could see that there's no way here, there's no control, for Input. These basically are played at a standard volume for both of them. What if you wanted to adjust them. Well, you can adjust them. Remember this aggregate device is taking BlackHole, which is this, and my microphone, which is this. So I could go to each one of these, like the microphone here, and there are volume controls in here for the input levels. The same thing here. So I could adjust them right here for each one. So if I wanted my mic to be full volume but the video to be playing at half volume I could adjust it down and now this device here will be receiving full volume mic and half volume for BlackHole. When you're done using this it's important to remember to switch everything back. You don't want to just keep using this all the time. So in this case I could go and Control click on external headphones and say use this device for sound output. Or go to System Preferences and then Sound and then for Output I could change back to my regular output. Then same thing for Input. You want to change it back to whatever you normally have it set to. So in this case maybe I have it set to my mic normally.
Remember to do these steps when you're done recording so you don't have to do them later on. Note that you can also get to these sound settings by going into Control Center and then Sound and then here you've got your Output devices there as well. So I could select one of these from there without having to go all the way into System Preferences.

Comments: 26 Responses to “How To Record Your Mac Screen With Audio”

wbump25

4 years ago

Thanks for this. I haven't needed to do this much since the pandemic, but for anyone that needs audio recorded when creating a recording, this is terrific.
Your instructions are concise and clear.
Great!

John

4 years ago

This was great content and well presented. Thanks. I've been looking for this for a while.

brad

4 years ago

I've tried a bunch of free methods for capturing screen video w/ audio and always got what I paid for. It has baffled me why the process has been so complicated and not made a part of the os's since wayback. This is a great alternative to anything I've found and will be glad to have it every 6 mos or so when I want to record something worth nothing. :) Gary, I bet you've forgotten more than I've known! Thanks again and again and again!

Kim Nguyen

4 years ago

Hello! I just came from the "To Record Your Mac Screen With Audio 2020" video tutorial. Thank you for providing this, I've been screen recording and trying to find ways to record with the audio too!

Jimmy Tee

4 years ago

Thanks heaps! Big Sur's 'improvement' was driving me crazy.

Kali

4 years ago

This is great ! is there any way to record a portion of the screen instead of the whole desktop ? l
Thank you !

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Kali: See https://macmost.com/how-to-do-a-screen-recording-on-your-mac.html

Edarmo

4 years ago

thank you

Marcus Ferreira

4 years ago

I have been having a lot of problems recording audio with my Mac.

4 years ago

Unfortunately, I tried this after trying other similar tutorials and still not working for me. I have bigsur OS. As soon as I set the BH + Speakers as the sound output, all sound goes out on my computer, and it doesn't record it either.

Kai

4 years ago

Thanks for the great tutorial! Screen recording with audio is working in general (e.g. for YouTube), but unfortunately not working with a Zoom meeting (even if the Zoom audio setting is setup to use the system settings). What am I doing wrong?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Kai: For Zoom, use the built-in Zoom recording feature.

Kai

4 years ago

The problem with Zoom is that the recording is either disabled by the host and/or everybody is informed about the recording. I wonder whether there is an easy solution with your approach. Actually I do not understand why there is a difference in recording YouTube videos (working) and Zoom (not working). PS: I am using BigSur.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Kai: You are opening up a whole can of legal worms there. In many places it is illegal to record someone without their permission, not to mention unethical. If the owner of a Zoom meeting doesn't want there to be a recording, then debate that with them, but don't try to record it anyway, right?

Kai

4 years ago

Totally agreed, thank you!

george

3 years ago

thanks for this workaround now that Catalina came around and quick time isn't the same I'm glad this option saved me from going crazy to find a replacement

jerry

3 years ago

gameplay

Dario

3 years ago

Thanks this is the only good tutorial out there. I just have the problem whenever I switch to BH + Mic everything starts to playback at half the speed. What's the issue here?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Dario: I can't imagine how one would have anything to do with the other. By "everything" do you mean in any app? Like QuickTime Player, TV, Music, web videos in Safari, etc?

gulcan

3 years ago

I am trying to do screen recording with audio and am using Big Sur, I am having problems. if you could help me would be very happy.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

gulcan: Just follow along closely with the instructions in the video.

Ira Abramowitz

3 years ago

I cannot get Blackhole to work with OBS on my Mac mini M1 (Monterey) for display recording. No Sound. Blackhole does work with built-in Screen Recording. Are there any alternates? Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Ira: What are you trying to record? No every app will allow this.

Ira Abramowitz

3 years ago

I want a screen recording with sound from Safari. I get the picture, but no sound with an OBS recording. I get picture and sound using the built-in (Option-Shift-5) record. I just want to get a compressed output directly so I am using OBS. Thanks

Ira Abramowitz

3 years ago

Within OBS, I set a scene for screen capture with the mic being set for blackhole 2, volume at maximum, but the volume bar had no indication of sound. I tried other inputs as blackhole, but they didn't work either.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Ira: Ah, so Blackhole is working, you just have to figure out how to do it in OBS. Just make sure you add audio to your "scene' as well as video. Set the audio to your Blackhole capture. See https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/mac-desktop-audio-using-blackhole.1191/

Comments Closed.

How To Record Your Mac Screen With Audio

Comments: 26 Responses to “How To Record Your Mac Screen With Audio”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information