How to Record Your Screen on Mac With Audio

To record your screen on Mac, press Command + Shift + 5 to open the screenshot and screen recording toolbar, choose Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion, and click Record. To capture microphone commentary or system audio, click Options on the toolbar before starting to select your active audio input source.

Recording your screen on macOS is essential for software demos, bug reports, and video tutorials. Apple provides powerful built-in recording capabilities without needing heavy third-party software.

Native Screen Recording Shortcuts in macOS

The universal shortcut for macOS screen recording is Command + Shift + 5. This brings up an on-screen toolbar with two distinct video recording buttons:

• Record Entire Screen: Displays a monitor icon. Clicking anywhere on your screen starts recording the entire display immediately. If you have multiple displays, hover over your target screen and click.
• Record Selected Portion: Displays a dashed box icon. Allows you to drag a resizable frame over a specific window, application area, or browser viewport.

How to Record Screen with Microphone Audio

A common complaint with macOS screen recording is that videos record without sound. By default, macOS sets the audio input to None for privacy reasons.

To enable audio recording:

1. Press Command + Shift + 5 to bring up the toolbar.
2. Click on the Options drop-down menu.
3. Under the Microphone header, select your built-in Mac microphone or connected USB/Bluetooth headset.
4. Enable Show Mouse Clicks if you want black rings to appear around your cursor when clicking during the recording.

Recording a Window or Custom Area

Recording an entire 4K or 5K display produces enormous video files that are hard to send via Slack or email. Recording a smaller bounding area keeps file sizes compact and ensures text remains readable for viewers on smaller screens.

Select Record Selected Portion, drag the handles to match your application window, and click Record.

Where Screen Recordings Are Saved by Default

macOS saves completed screen recordings as .mov files encoded in H.264 or HEVC on your Desktop. You can change this destination by clicking Options → Save to and picking Documents, Downloads, or a custom project directory.

Instant Screen Capture and Text Grab with Tegaro

While video recordings are great for dynamic workflows, sharing static information is often faster. In Tegaro Screenshots, daily communication is streamlined:

• Screen Text Grab (⌃⌥T): Instead of recording video of text or code, drag a box to extract text directly to your clipboard using on-device OCR.
• Auto-Blur Sensitive Strings: Blur out tokens, API keys, and personal emails before sharing images.
• Unified Toolkit: Combines screenshots with clipboard history, audio dictation, and display controls in one native app.

Frequently Asked Questions