How to record a meeting on a Mac

You want a recording of a meeting, and specifically you want the other people's voices in it, not only your own. There are three routes. Use the built-in tools, QuickTime Player or the Shift-Command-5 screenshot toolbar, with a virtual audio driver like BlackHole to reroute the sound. Add a bot note-taker that joins the call and records it in the cloud. Or run an on-device recorder that captures the audio coming out of your Mac directly. The catch nobody leads with: QuickTime and the screenshot toolbar record your microphone only, never the other side, because macOS deliberately walls off one app's audio from another. This guide is about the audio and the transcript, not the video.

Does a Mac have a built-in meeting recorder?

Yes and no. macOS ships two screen recorders you can aim at a call: QuickTime Player and the screenshot toolbar you open with Shift-Command-5. Both record the screen, and both can record a microphone you choose. Neither records system audio, the sound your Mac is actually playing, without a workaround. So the built-in tools handle one job well and one job not at all. Recording yourself presenting is easy, because your voice comes through the mic. Recording the person on the other end of a call is the part that falls over, because their voice arrives as system audio and the built-in tools cannot see it.

Why QuickTime and the screenshot toolbar only catch your own voice

This is the bit every other guide skips, and it is the whole reason the job is harder than it looks. macOS treats audio routing as a privacy boundary. An app is allowed to hear a microphone you point at it, because you chose to point it there. It is not allowed to quietly tap the audio another app is playing, because if any app could listen to any other app's sound, a call you are on could be captured by anything running in the background. So the microphone picker in QuickTime and in the Shift-Command-5 Options menu lists input devices only. The sound of the meeting, the other participant's voice, is output, and the built-in tools are walled off from it by design.

That single design choice is why every "record system audio on Mac" tutorial ends the same way: install a virtual audio driver. The driver pretends to be a microphone, you send your Mac's output into it, and now the recorder can "hear" the meeting because it thinks it is listening to a mic. The full mechanism, and why it is fiddly, is in how to record internal audio on a Mac.

The three routes, compared

Every way of recording a meeting on a Mac is one of three things. Here is how they differ on the questions that actually decide which one you want.

Route 1: the built-in tools plus a virtual audio driver

This costs nothing and it works, but it is the fiddly route. BlackHole is a free, open-source virtual audio driver. You install it, then in Audio MIDI Setup you create a Multi-Output Device that sends sound to both your speakers and BlackHole at once, so you can still hear the call while it is being captured. You set that Multi-Output Device as your Mac's output, then in QuickTime or the Shift-Command-5 toolbar you pick BlackHole as the input. Now the recorder captures the meeting.

The honest downside: this rig is brittle. Routing your output through a virtual device tends to knock out your keyboard volume keys, it can forget to switch when you plug in headphones, and mixing your own mic back in means stacking an Aggregate Device on top, which drifts out of sync on longer recordings. It also breaks after some macOS updates and has to be rebuilt. If you record meetings once in a while, it is fine. If you do it every week, the setup tax adds up.

Here are the steps and the pitfalls in full: how to record internal audio on a Mac.

Route 2: a bot note-taker that joins the call

Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and Zoom's own AI Companion all work the same way: you connect the tool to your calendar, and it sends a bot that joins the call as a participant, records it, and produces a transcript and a summary in the cloud. It is the least hands-on route, and the summaries are the draw. But two things are worth being clear-eyed about.

First, a bot is a participant. It shows up in the attendee list, and the recording lands on the vendor's servers, not on your Mac. Second, that raises a real consent problem. In August 2025 a class action, Brewer v. Otter.ai, was filed in the Northern District of California and later consolidated as case 5:25-cv-06911. It alleges Otter's Notetaker bot recorded and transcribed participants' conversations while getting consent, at most, from the meeting host who added it, and used the content to train its models. Whatever the outcome, the mechanism is the point: a bot that auto-joins your calendar can record people who never agreed to it. And a bot cannot help you at all with a call you did not host and cannot invite it to.

Route 3: an on-device recorder that captures system audio

There is a third route that most guides never separate out, and it is the one that got much better recently. Apple shipped ScreenCaptureKit in macOS 13, and it lets an approved app capture system audio natively, with your explicit permission and no virtual driver at all. An app built on it can record the sound coming out of your Mac, the other participant's voice included, without the BlackHole rig and without joining the call.

The practical difference from a bot: nothing appears in the participant list, and the audio never leaves your machine. It records whatever plays through the Mac, so it works for a call you did not organize and cannot add a note-taker to, which is exactly the case for a Google Meet you don't host. It works the same across platforms, so the mechanics of how you record a Zoom meeting on a Mac are the mechanics for Teams, Meet or a plain phone call played through the Mac. If what you actually want out of the recording is a searchable text record, pair it with a local transcriber and you can transcribe a Zoom meeting without any of it touching a server.

A word on consent (not legal advice)

Recording a conversation is not always yours to do quietly. In the US, most states and federal law follow one-party consent, meaning one person on the call, which can be you, is enough. But eleven states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Washington, require all-party consent: everyone has to know. When people are in different states, the stricter rule tends to win. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so the sane default is simple: check the rules where you and the other people are, and just tell them you are recording. A transcript you can point to is worth far less than a room that knew it was on.

How I record meetings on my Mac

I built Parameety to be the on-device route without the setup tax. It lives in the menu bar. You start it, and it captures your Mac's system output through ScreenCaptureKit, so the other participants come through, and it can optionally mix in your microphone so your side is in there too. No BlackHole, no Multi-Output Device, no Aggregate Device to keep rebuilding. No bot joins the call, so nothing shows up in the participant list, and it records calls you do not host just as happily as ones you do.

It transcribes on the Mac with Parakeet and writes a Markdown transcript to your Documents folder. The audio is discarded once the text is written, so what you keep is the transcript, not a pile of recordings on someone's server. Two honest limits worth stating plainly: it records audio, not video or the screen, and it gives you a plain verbatim transcript, not speaker labels and not an AI summary. If you want the words the meeting actually said, kept on your machine, that is the trade. If you want auto-generated minutes and a highlight reel, a bot note-taker does that and this does not.

FAQ

Does a Mac have a built-in meeting recorder?

Not a dedicated one, but macOS ships two screen recorders you can point at a call: QuickTime Player and the screenshot toolbar (Shift-Command-5). Both record the screen and both can record a microphone you pick in Options. Neither records system audio, the sound your Mac is playing, without help. So out of the box you can record yourself talking, but not the person on the other end.

Can QuickTime record a meeting with the other person's audio?

Not on its own. QuickTime records the microphone you select, so it captures your voice but not the audio the meeting app is playing back. To get the other side you have to install a virtual audio driver like BlackHole and reroute your Mac's output through it, or use an app built on ScreenCaptureKit that captures system audio directly. QuickTime alone gives you a recording of yourself in silence with the room.

How do I record myself doing a presentation on my Mac?

This is the one case the built-in tools handle cleanly. Press Shift-Command-5, click Options, choose your microphone, and select Record Entire Screen or a portion. It captures the screen plus your narration through the mic. You do not need any workaround here, because everything you want is either on screen or coming from you, not from another app's audio.

Can I record a video call I did not organize?

A bot note-taker usually cannot, because it needs to be invited into the call, and you cannot invite one to a meeting you do not host. An on-device recorder can, because it records the audio coming out of your Mac no matter who is hosting or which app the call is in. If you want the picture too, the Shift-Command-5 screen recorder captures video, but this guide and the tools it covers are about the audio and the transcript.