Here's the trap every Mac user hits eventually: you record your screen with Cmd+Shift+5 or QuickTime, play it back, and the video is silent — or worse, it's your microphone picking up your room while the actual app audio is missing. That's not a bug. macOS's built-in recorders capture your mic, and they simply do not capture system audio — the sound your Mac itself is playing.
Apple locks system audio away for a defensible reason (it's the same plumbing that would let any app silently tap your calls and music), but the result is that "record my screen with the sound" — the thing every other platform does with a checkbox — needs a workaround on a Mac. There are four real ones.
Option 1: BlackHole — the free virtual audio driver
BlackHole is the standard free fix. It installs a virtual audio device; you set your Mac's output to BlackHole, tell QuickTime or OBS to use BlackHole as the input, and the system's sound is routed into your recording.
The catch: while audio routes through BlackHole you can't hear it yourself, unless you also build a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup that feeds both BlackHole and your speakers. It works, it's free, and it's a genuinely fiddly fifteen minutes of setup that you'll redo whenever you switch headphones. Forgetting to switch your output back afterwards is a rite of passage.
Option 2: Loopback — the paid version of the same idea
Rogue Amoeba's Loopback ($99+) does BlackHole's job with a proper UI: per-app audio capture, monitoring while you record, saved routing setups. If you record audio professionally — podcasts, streams, mixed sources — it's the best tool in its class. As a one-feature fix for screen recordings, it costs more than most screen recorders.
Option 3: OBS Studio — free, with its own audio capture
Recent OBS versions can capture macOS app audio directly (via its own capture plumbing on macOS 13+), no virtual driver required. If you already use OBS for screen recording in general, add an Audio Capture source, pick the app, and you're done.
The catch: it's OBS — scenes, sources, and settings before every recording, and a flat unedited capture after it. Great for streams and long sessions; heavy for a one-minute demo with sound.
Option 4: A recorder that captures system audio natively
The category of purpose-built demo recorders treats system audio as a feature, not a routing project. ZoomCap captures system audio alongside the screen with no virtual drivers and no Audio MIDI Setup — start a recording with one terminal command, and the app's sound, your mic, or both end up in the export. Everything is processed locally, and on the way out you also get the auto-zoom and cursor treatment that make the recording presentable (the difference that motivated us to catalogue why raw captures look bad).
Which one should you pick?
- Free, occasional, don't mind fiddling: BlackHole + QuickTime. Budget fifteen minutes the first time.
- Professional multi-source audio work: Loopback.
- Already an OBS user, or recording long sessions: OBS's app audio capture.
- Product demos and tutorials with sound: a recorder with native system audio. One tool, no routing, and the video comes out polished instead of flat.
Two footnotes worth knowing. First, if you only need the audio for a video call or webinar, check whether the meeting app records itself — Zoom, Meet, and Teams all capture their own audio server-side, which sidesteps this entire problem. Second, whichever route you take, do a five-second test recording and play it back before the real thing. System audio failures are silent by definition — you won't notice until it's too late.