Using Local Capture To Record Yourself For Content Creation

Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use the new Local Capture feature on your iPhone or your iPad. 

So a new feature on iOS  26 and iPad  26 is Local Capture. This allows you to record your audio and your video while talking on your phone or using FaceTime or some other conferencing app. Now it's pretty simple to use and works very well but it is important to understand what it does. 

It's called Local Capture because it only captures your local audio or video. In other words YOU. So your voice talking on the phone or and video also talking over FaceTime or some other app like Zoom. The purpose of this is to allow people that create content, like say podcasters, to be able to record a high quality audio and video stream while talking with somebody else. Say creating a podcast or doing an interview. Right now it's common to do this on a Mac using a second app to record your local audio and video while also conferencing somebody else.  The stream that's going across the internet where you see them and they see you, that's lower quality than what you've got and highly compressed, of course, to be able to stream in real time over the internet. When you're done the two different high quality video or audio streams can be then combined to create the final high quality podcast. But you can't do that on an iPhone or iPad because if you're using say FaceTime or Zoom audio and video you can't use another app to also record the same audio and video at the same time.

But the Local Capture feature of iOS and iPad OS now lets you capture that high quality stream and save it as a file and then the files from all the participants can be combined to create a high quality podcast, interview, or any kind of content. So to use it the first thing you want to do is you want to go into Control Center by swiping down from the top right. Then tap and hold in a blank are so you can Edit and Add a control. Search in the controls for Local Capture and then simply Add Local Capture as a button in Control Center. So now you can access it during your next call. 

So now let's say you're using FaceTime. So you start a FaceTime Audio call and you're chatting with the other person. Now you decide you want to do Local Capture. You want to capture your voice as audio so you have a high quality audio file. To do this what you're going to do, after the call has started, is go to Control Center. Swipe down from the top and then tap that Local Capture button. It will give you a countdown and then it will start recording. You'll see the little red do there at the top. You can, at any time, tap on that red dot if you wish to stop the Local Capture. Like that. Then you have a stop button there. You can also see the length of the Local Capture. Once you stop then you can use the Show Files button to now jump to the Files App and it will open up that file. So there it is right there and if you just cancel there you can see it listed under Recents. You've got that file now to use and work with another app that handles audio.

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Now there are some more settings for this. If you go in the Settings App and you go to General look for Local Capture. This was added in iOS and iPad OS 26.1 and you can change the downloads location. You can also switch to Audio Only. So you can actually do a video conference with somebody but only record the audio. This is a common way to record audio podcasts. You can see each other but you only want the audio stream. Also note that when you start Local Capture you can tap and hold and you have the option to switch to Audio Only right there. So you can do it on a case-by-case basis. 

Now here's an example of doing it with FaceTime and video. So, I'm going to start a FaceTime video right call here and then after the call is started I'm going to use the Local Capture button, right there, and start it. Now it is going to capture both the audio and video. You saw it even give me a preview of what it was going to capture there. Now bring up Control Center and use the button in Control Center to stop it. Then I can Show in Files and this time it's a Quick Time video file, like this. I even have buttons at the bottom where I can trim the video and I can change the playback speed if I want to play it back to check it. I can Share it out. I can also tap at the top there to Save the video to another location. It's kind of opened up in a video preview in the Files App. There it is in Recents. If you want to find the actual file you can tap and hold and always use the Show in Closing folder option there in the Files App. In this case it jumps to the Downloads Folder which is where I had it set to Save. 

Let's take a look at using it with a regular phone call. So you're talking to somebody on the phone. You've got a phone app there. You can bring up Control Center. You can start the Local Capture, like that. You going to capture just your end of the phone conversation. So this allows you to record high quality audio for podcaster content even if you are not using an internet streaming app like FaceTime or Zoom

Speaking of Zoom here I am in the Zoom App showing this work inn a third party app. I can start Local Capture just as easily with Zoom being the app as I can with FaceTime. Now it's recording there. I can go back up to Control Center when I want to stop recording. Stop it and then I can view the video file. 

So Local Capture is a really useful tool for recording high quality audio and video while creating content. If you're looking for a tool that will allow you to, say, record a phone call, well you can do that in the Phone App. There's a Call Recording button that will record the stream from both ends. Other apps usually have their own process. For instance in Zoom you can certainly record a meeting that's built into the Zoom App. You'll get everything you see during the meeting recorded but it's the streamed version. Great for keeping records or being able to review a meeting but not necessarily for creating content. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.