How to Record System Audio on Mac Without a Virtual Audio Driver

You recorded a walkthrough of your app, complete with the notification chime, the video playing in the browser, the sound the product makes when a task completes. You play it back and hear your voice, the hum of the room, and nothing else. If you have tried to record system audio on a Mac before, you know this moment: the picture is perfect and the computer is silent.

The usual advice is a forum thread from years ago telling you to install an audio driver, create a multi-output device, and remember to switch everything back afterwards.

Why does a Mac screen recording have no sound?

On most Macs in use today, the recorder built into macOS lets you choose a microphone and nothing else. Apple documents an "Include System Audio" option only from macOS 27 onwards; on every earlier version the Mac's own output is not offered as a source. So whatever the app plays goes to your speakers or headphones and never reaches the file.

For years the workaround was a virtual audio driver, sometimes called a loopback device. You install it, tell macOS to send sound to it instead of your speakers, and point the recorder at it as though it were a microphone. The ReScreen vs QuickTime Player comparison goes into where the built-in tool fits and where it runs out.

What goes wrong with loopback drivers?

Routing audio by hand is not hard, but it is the kind of setup that fails quietly:

• You cannot hear what you are recording unless you also build a multi-output device, because the sound is going to the virtual device instead of your ears.
• You forget to switch back. The recording ends, and an hour later you are wondering why your Mac has no sound in a meeting.
• Voice and app sound arrive pre-mixed. If you combine the mic and the loopback into one input, a loud sound effect on top of a sentence cannot be separated afterwards.
• It is one more thing to maintain. A driver is system-level software that has to keep up with each macOS release, on every Mac you record from.

How ReScreen records system audio

ReScreen captures system audio through macOS itself. There is no virtual driver, no kernel extension and no loopback routing. You switch system audio on next to the microphone in the recorder, and the sound keeps playing through your speakers or headphones as normal while it is captured.

This is part of the camera and audio side of the app, which treats a recording as four independent tracks: screen, camera, microphone and system audio. The app's sound is never folded into your voice at capture time.

All audio is resampled to 48 kHz as it comes in. In practice that means a Bluetooth microphone such as AirPods and a high-sample-rate audio interface both just work next to the system track, without a settings hunt.

The setup, in steps

1. Pick what to capture: a display, a window, a single application, or a region you draw.
2. Turn on the microphone and check the live meter is moving when you speak.
3. Turn on system audio.
4. Put on headphones (more on that below).
5. Press ⌥⌘R to start, and ⌥⌘R again to stop. ⌥⌘M mutes or unmutes the microphone mid-take if you need to cough.

When you stop, the editor opens with separate Mic and System tracks on the timeline.

Should system audio be as loud as your voice?

Almost never. At equal levels, the product drowns out the person explaining it.

ReScreen starts system audio at 60 % so it sits under your narration by default. From there, each track has its own controls:

Because the tracks are independent, none of these decisions is made at record time. The reasoning behind that design, and the takes it rescues, is covered in why separate audio tracks save a screen recording.

Why headphones still matter

ReScreen does not do echo cancellation, and its voice cleanup is conventional processing rather than AI voice isolation. If the app's sound plays through your speakers, your microphone will pick it up, and it will appear on the mic track as well as the system track, slightly late and slightly roomy.

Headphones solve this completely. The system audio goes to your ears and to the system track, the microphone hears only you, and the two stay cleanly separate. If you already have a take with a quiet voice or a noisy room, the guide to fixing bad audio in screen recordings walks through "Reduce background noise", "Level voice volume" and the "Voice enhancement" levels.

Who needs to record internal audio on a Mac?

• Product marketers and founders whose product has sound: media players, communication tools, games, anything with audible feedback. A silent demo of an audio product undersells it.
• Course creators and educators teaching music software, video editing or language material, where the sound is the lesson.
• Support agents reproducing "the alert does not play" or showing that it does.
• YouTube tutorial makers, who need clean narration over quieter app sound. The guide to software tutorial videos people actually finish covers the rest.

The shared pain is not just "no sound". It is discovering there is no sound after a good take, with no way to add it back.

What about the file you get at the end?

Two things come out of a recording. A ready-to-play MP4 is written beside the project the moment the take stops, with microphone and system audio mixed into one track so it plays anywhere. The project itself keeps the tracks apart, and Export renders your mix: the levels, mutes and fades you chose in the editor.

Everything stays on your Mac throughout. Capture options, including recording a single application, are on the screen recording page.

Next step: record one take with sound

Record a minute of the noisiest part of your product with microphone and system audio both on, wearing headphones. Stop, mute each track in turn in the editor, and you will hear the difference between a flattened recording and one you can actually mix.

ReScreen runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel. System audio capture is included in every plan, with no watermark and no time limits. Compare the plans on the pricing page, then download ReScreen and make your next recording one the viewer can hear.