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Record the sound your Mac plays

System audio capture with no virtual audio driver

Quick wins first: if you want the sound your Mac plays — a meeting's other participants, a video, an app's music — in your recording, the screen recorder built into macOS cannot do it: its recordings carry the microphone only. kilde records system audio natively, with the screen or as audio alone, in one command and without installing a virtual audio driver.

When you record the screen on macOS, the audio choice you are offered is a microphone. The sound coming out of your speakers — the other side of a call, the video you are watching — is never an input there, so it never reaches the file. Recording the room with a mic instead picks up echo and keyboard noise instead of clean app audio.

The classic workaround is a virtual audio driver (Soundflower, BlackHole) that pipes system sound into an input. It works, but it adds setup, routing puzzles, and a kernel of doubt every time macOS updates.

1. Install kilde. The menu bar app comes from the Mac App Store; the CLI installs with Homebrew or a release binary.
2. Check the environment. Run kilde doctor — it verifies screen recording permission and prompts for anything missing.
3. Record. kilde rec demo.mov captures the screen with the sound your Mac plays, in one file. From the menu bar app, pick the display and press record.
4. Stop safely. Ctrl+C (or the menu bar stop button) always finalizes the file — a half-written recording is never left behind.

Only need the sound — a meeting's audio to transcribe later, a lecture, an interview? Record audio alone:

kilde rec --no-video meeting.m4a

You get an M4A with the system audio (your microphone can be mixed in, or kept on a separate track with --audio-tracks separate).

kilde is built on ScreenCaptureKit — the same macOS framework the system's own screen capture uses. It taps the audio your Mac plays at the source, so there is nothing to route, no device to create, and nothing that breaks when you update macOS. Free, open source, and MIT-licensed.