QuickTime Screen Recording with Audio: Why It Doesn't Work (and 2 Fixes)

You hit record. You play the video. You hit stop. You play it back and hear nothing.

This catches everyone off guard the first time. QuickTime captures your screen. It captures your microphone. What it doesn’t capture is any audio your Mac is actually playing. No Zoom participant voice. No YouTube playback. No Logic track, no game sound, no call audio. Silence where the whole point of the recording was supposed to be.

The fix is real, and it’s not obvious.

Why QuickTime Can’t Record System Audio

Apple doesn’t ship an API for apps to capture other apps’ audio output. The system is locked down by design. To route audio from Zoom, Safari, or any other app into a recording, you need a virtual audio driver that poses as a speaker, receives the audio, and hands it back as an input stream. QuickTime can then record that input the way it would record any microphone.

Audio drivers on macOS have to be signed. They used to be kernel extensions (kexts) installed into the OS at a privileged level. Since macOS 10.15 kexts are deprecated. Apple pushed everyone to DriverKit system extensions. Both require explicit user approval, and kext loading involves booting into Recovery Mode, disabling a chunk of System Integrity Protection, reauthorizing the driver, and rebooting. On Apple Silicon the flow is stricter still. Reduced Security has to be toggled through Startup Security Utility, and the authorization often has to be repeated after updates.

This is why Soundflower is dead. The original was abandoned. The forks haven’t kept up with modern macOS. Anyone telling you to use Soundflower is reading a blog post from ten years ago.

The working replacement today is BlackHole.

Fix 1: BlackHole + QuickTime (Free)

BlackHole is a free, open-source virtual audio driver from Existential Audio. It shows up as an audio device on your Mac and loops whatever gets played into it back out as an input. That loopback is what QuickTime can record.

The setup has three parts. Install the driver, create a device that plays audio to both your speakers and BlackHole, then point QuickTime at BlackHole as if it were a microphone.

Step 1: Install BlackHole

Grab it from existential.audio/blackhole. The 2-channel version is what you want for screen recording. It’s a standard installer and doesn’t need Recovery Mode on modern macOS. One reboot and you’re done.

Step 2: Create a Multi-Output Device

Open Audio MIDI Setup (Spotlight will find it). In the bottom-left + menu pick Create Multi-Output Device. Check both your built-in speakers (or headphones) and BlackHole 2ch. Rename it something obvious like “Speakers + BlackHole.”

Set that multi-output device as your system’s main output, either from the menu bar sound icon or System Settings, Sound, Output. Every sound your Mac plays will now go to your ears and to BlackHole at the same time.

Step 3: Record in QuickTime

Open QuickTime. File, New Screen Recording. Click the little arrow next to the record button. Under Microphone, pick BlackHole 2ch. Hit record. QuickTime now captures video plus whatever audio is routed through BlackHole.

That’s the free path. It works.

The Gotchas Nobody Warns You About

The setup above has real sharp edges, and you’ll hit them.

You lose your real mic. QuickTime only has one input slot. If you pick BlackHole, you can’t also record your voice. Narrating a tutorial? You need the Aggregate Device trick below.

AirPods destroy the routing. Connect AirPods mid-recording and macOS sometimes switches the system output back to AirPods, bypassing your multi-output device. Audio disappears from the recording. You won’t notice until playback.

Sample rate mismatches crackle. BlackHole defaults to 48 kHz. If an app plays 44.1 kHz audio into a device expecting 48 kHz, you get pops, clicks, or a slight pitch shift. In Audio MIDI Setup set every device in the chain to the same sample rate. When in doubt, 48 kHz.

Volume control gets weird. Multi-output devices ignore the system volume slider for most of the devices in the group. You end up adjusting volume inside apps, or accepting that your keyboard volume keys do nothing for the duration of the recording.

It’s global. There’s no per-app routing. If you’re recording a demo and Slack dings, the ding ends up in your video. Same for Calendar alerts, email notifications, and your partner’s FaceTime call that comes in three seconds after you hit record.

Recording Mic + System Audio Together

For tutorials and walkthroughs where you talk over what’s on screen, you need an Aggregate Device.

In Audio MIDI Setup, hit +, pick Create Aggregate Device, and check both BlackHole 2ch and your microphone. Turn on Drift Correction for the mic input. Now QuickTime sees one “device” that carries both streams mixed into a single track. Select it as the microphone.

This works. It’s also the most fragile part of the stack. Swap a USB mic mid-setup and the aggregate device often breaks silently. The two audio sources are mixed down to one track, so if the system audio is too loud and buries your voice, you can’t rebalance them afterward. What’s baked in is baked in.

Fix 2: Skip All of This

A lot of people looking for “quicktime screen recording with audio” aren’t here because they love QuickTime. They’re here because QuickTime is already installed. What they actually want is a recording, with audio, now.

ShipClip records system audio and microphone on separate tracks automatically. No drivers. No Recovery Mode. No Audio MIDI Setup. No aggregate devices. Install it, hit record, get audio.

Because the tracks stay separate through the entire pipeline, you can mute the system audio, solo the mic, fade one under the other, or draw volume automation keyframes to duck background music under your voice. None of that is possible once QuickTime and BlackHole have already mixed the audio down to one track.

ShipClip also captures cursor paths, click events, and keystrokes as metadata, so the editor can layer in zoom-to-click, click indicators, and keystroke overlays after the fact. Because it’s native (no Electron, no Chromium shell), a 10-minute recording exports in under 3 minutes on an M1.

ShipClip runs on macOS 14 and later. There’s a 7 day free trial with every Pro feature unlocked.

Download ShipClip and try it on a real recording today. If BlackHole is already working for you and you just need the free path, keep that setup. If the aggregate device has broken for the third time this month, you already know what to do.