If you select ‘Pause’, your recording will pause until you select it to be resumed again. In order to stop or pause a recording altogether, click on the menubar icon once again and select ’Stop’ or ‘Pause’ from the dropdown respectively. You will also notice the menubar microphone icon showing coloured movement according to the level of audio input it is receiving. Once you start recording, you’ll notice the menubar icon display the elapsed time of the recording as the app continues to record audio. To record audio, simply click the menubar icon and select ‘Start Recording’, as seen below. You may either Dismiss this dialog box or simply click on the microphone menubar icon for Audio Recorder, and begin recording right away. On first launch, you are presented with a launch dialog that appears as follows: The app runs in your menubar on the top of the screen on your Mac. It supports high quality audio recording and playback. You can use it to record voice notes, lectures, meetings, interviews and much more. I would look elsewhere.Audio Recorder is a sleek menubar app that makes it easy to start recording audio at a click of a button. Audacity does work, but its peculiarities and irritations outweigh any advantages. And lets you name files as you want– spaces and all.įor basic recording, it’s the only way to go.įor more complex, multi-track adventures, including the ability to trim, etc. No, turns out you do all that through Apple’s own QuickTime Player! Yes, it’s called “player” but it records like a champ. I had gotten it because I thought I needed some other program to record messages, bird songs, etc. It will indicate that a file could not be saved, yet it will change the name of the window you are looking at. It will balk at exporting files in its different formats–in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. It will repeatedly claim that you have no disk space for saving, even when you have scores of gigs. It does NOT permit spaces in file names– you will forever will be pressing space and the file will start playing! Arrgghh! Refer to Audacity’s documentation for an explanation of it’s advanced features.Īudacity is marvelous at one level a complete pain and irritation at another. It has a steeper learning curve than QuickTime’s audio recording feature, but it is far more powerful and better suited for longer recordings where editing is needed. You can find a version that is backwards compatible with macs running much older versions of OS X. It is a powerful recorder, editor, and converter.
#DEFAULT AUDIO RECORDER MAC FREE#
How about a free app for recording as well as editing sound? You can also try the free and open source Audacity sound recorder. However, audio recording was a paid feature of QuickTime Pro.
#DEFAULT AUDIO RECORDER MAC MAC OS#
Note: QuickTime 7 is also built into earlier versions of Mac OS X. This is overkill in most situations, and file compatibility is limited. The Maximum quality setting saves AIFC files using PCM S24 codec and produces rather large files. This is good balance of quality, file size and file compatibility. The High quality setting records M4A files with variable bitrate using the AAC code. Newer Macs have only the Microphone available as the audio source. Older Macs will generally have two input sources: Build-in Microphone and a Line-in from the 3.5mm jack.