Bench guide

Record your Mac screen with audio

Capture your Mac screen with system sound, your voice, or both — without wrestling with virtual audio drivers.

4 min read

You hit record on a Mac screen recording, walk through the bug, and stop. The video plays back silent. macOS captured the screen but skipped the audio entirely — because recording system audio on a Mac has historically been a pain.

Two paths

The free way (built-in macOS)

macOS lets you record the screen with microphone audio out of the box, but not system audio (the sound coming out of your Mac). For that, you’d need a third-party audio routing driver like BlackHole or Loopback.

  1. Press ⌘⇧5 to open the Screenshot toolbar.
  2. Pick Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion.
  3. Click Options and under Microphone, select your mic (e.g. MacBook Pro Microphone).
  4. Click Record. When you're done, click the stop icon in the menu bar.
  5. The video saves to your Desktop as a .mov file.

This works fine for narration. But if the thing you need to record is a Zoom call, a YouTube video, or anything where the audio is coming from the Mac, you’ll capture silence unless you install an audio driver.

The Bench way

Bench records mic audio, system audio, or both — without any kernel extensions.

  1. Press ⌘⇧6 for area recording or ⌘⇧7 for full-screen.
  2. In the pre-record bar that appears, click the microphone icon and choose your input (built-in, AirPods, or external).
  3. Click the speaker icon next to it to capture system audio — what your Mac is playing.
  4. Click Start. A small floating controller stays out of the way while you record.
  5. Hit the stop button (or use the menu bar). Bench drops you straight into the editor with the video ready to trim or share.

Bench uses macOS’s modern ScreenCaptureKit framework, which means system audio capture is built in — no BlackHole, no Loopback, no audio drivers to install. On the first recording, macOS will ask you to grant Screen Recording and Microphone permissions in System Settings; that’s a one-time thing.

When you’re done editing, click Share and Bench Cloud gives you a bnch.sh/… link your viewer can play in any browser. The links use unguessable 20-character codes, and you can delete any recording from your library to kill the link instantly.

For tutorials and bug reports, the audio is often the whole point. Don’t ship a silent video.

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