The Free And Easy Way To Record Audio On Your Mac
DAWs are a powerful way to record and mix songs, podcasts, narration and more, but sometimes you just want a fast and easy way to capture the audio. If you want to record audio on your Mac then here’s three easy ways to do it, even better they are all free.
QuickTime Player - Free And Easy
We often think of QuickTime on the Mac as a video playback app, however, over the last few years, Apple has extended the functionality of Quicktime to include video, screen cap and audio recording.
To record audio with QuickTime Player it takes less than a minute to set up.
Go to System Preferences
Choose the Sound option
Choose the input tab at the top then select the device you want to use from the list. This can include audio interfaces or USB mics connected. You can also use the internal mic if you just want to get an idea down fast, but for anything that requires higher quality use a external microphone.
Open Quicktime Player
Choose New Audio Recording from the File menu, or CMD, Shift, N as the keyboard shortcut.
Next to the red record button in the centre of the app click the dropdown menu. Here you can select which input to use and the quality of the record.
When you are ready press record.
When you are done you can export the audio file. Use the Export option in the File menu, select Audio Only and save it with a name of your choice.
If you want to perform a basic trim option then choose the Trim option in the Edit menu or CMD T as the keyboard shortcut.
If you need to edit it then you can drag it into the DAW of your choice.
To find out more about using QuickTime Player visit the Apple User Guide
You can even use Quicktime to capture multichannel audio with minimal setup. Check out Luke’s how to guide here.
Voice Memos - Free And Connected
Voice Memos used to be an app on the iPhone, it’s now an app for macOS too. Even better if you use iCloud your content gets synced across all your devices. This means you can use it to capture audio on your iPhone, iPad or Mac and then access it on any of those devices.
To record audio using Voice Memos do the following.
Open the Voice Memos app.
Just like QuickTime, Voice memos relies on the System Audio to select the input device. To check this follow steps 1-3 shown in the QuickTime setup above.
To ensure the highest quality audio is recorded open the preferences menu on the Voice Memo app and select Lossless in the Audio Quality menu.
Press the red button to start recording.
You can trim and enhance the recording afterwards.
To find out more about using Voice Memos visit the Apple User Guide
Descript - Free And Powerful
Descript is fast becoming the go-to app for those wanting to record video and audio and transcribe it. It also has some powerful audio tools built in. For example you can edit audio like editing text in a word-processor, it also takes poor quality audio and can make a dramatic improvement to it using a feature called Studio Sound. Even better, there’s a free version of Descript that offers most of the features mentioned. It’s perfect for podcasters and those making things like talking books.
Descript has an excellent resource for those wanting to learn Descript. Here is their page on Recording audio with Descript.
Once you’ve captured the audio then Descript offers the following features;
Automatic transcription
Audio editing
Audio effects like compression, EQ and more.
Studio sound.
The free version of Descript offers the following;
3hrs of transcription
Full audio & video editing
Unlimited screen recordings
Overdub trial
Studio Sound effect
Summary
Simple doesn’t have to mean poor quality, sometimes the line of least resistance is the best solution if you want to capture a voice recording or a song idea. In fact, this may be the best solution so that the technology doesn’t get in the way of the idea.