Record one app's audio, and nothing else
App-scoped audio capture — no virtual audio driver
The wish is simple: the recording should carry the meeting app's sound — the participants' voices — and none of the rest of your desktop. Yet a normal system-audio recording sweeps in everything your Mac plays: notification chimes, music, a video from another window. kilde can scope the audio to a single app instead, with two mechanisms: capturing a window whose audio stays with its app, and — on macOS 15 or later — recording one running app's audio directly. No virtual audio driver anywhere.
Why whole-desktop audio leaks into the take
System-audio capture, done the general way, records every sound your Mac plays. For a meeting recording that becomes a transcript or minutes later, the leaks are exactly the sounds you did not want: a calendar reminder mid-sentence, chat pings, whatever was paused in another app. The voices are in the file — and so is everything else.
Muting the rest by hand is fragile: you silence what you remember, and the one app you forgot chimes anyway. What you actually want is to point at one app and say “this app's sound, only.”
Way 1: capture the app's window — the audio follows it
kilde rec --no-video --window zoom meeting.m4a
--window matches a window by partial title, bundle ID, or window ID (run
kilde devices to list them), records just that window, and scopes the system
audio to that window's app: sounds from other apps — their notification
chimes included — stay out of the file, while the captured app's own sounds (its join chime
included) stay in. In the menu bar app, choose the meeting window as the capture target and
the audio follows the same rule. This works on macOS 14 or later.
Way 2: record one app's audio directly (macOS 15+)
kilde rec --no-video --audio app:zoom --audio mic meeting.m4a
On macOS 15 or later, --audio app: records a running app's audio
directly, by name (partial match) or bundle ID (exact, case-insensitive). The example above
keeps your microphone alongside it; with --audio-tracks separate the sources stay
on their own tracks. Two things to know: it cannot be combined with --audio system,
and if the app you name cannot be resolved, kilde fails before recording starts rather than
silently falling back to whole-system audio — you find out before the meeting, not after.
The menu bar app can pick app-specific audio as a source too (the option appears on macOS 15
or later).
If the recording is a meeting
App-scoped audio is exactly what a meeting take needs — the meeting recording guide covers the full setup, including mixing the participants' audio and your microphone into one file.
From the take to minutes
On macOS 26 or later, kilde can transcribe the recording entirely on your Mac — nothing is uploaded — and write the transcript next to the file as Markdown, SRT, WebVTT, plain text, or JSON. On Macs with Apple Intelligence enabled, it can also draft a summary. Transcription and summaries are on-device and free to use today; kilde itself is open source, MIT-licensed. See transcribing without a bot.
Recording consent is your responsibility: when you record a meeting, make sure every participant is informed and has consented, in accordance with the laws of your region.