Record system audio online

System audio is sound produced by another tab, application, or the operating system. Browser rules decide which sources appear in the sharing picker.

A browser tab is usually the most reliable choice for web video and browser meetings. Full-screen or application capture may not include sound on every operating system.

Chrome and Edge use the screen-sharing permission flow for system sound. Safari and Firefox do not currently provide compatible system-audio capture.

If no audio track appears, retry and confirm that Share audio is selected. You can switch to microphone recording when system capture is unavailable.

People call this several different things and they all mean one capture. Computer audio, PC audio, desktop audio, internal audio and system sound are the same job: the sound your machine is playing, rather than the sound in the room. If you searched for any of those and landed here, this is the right page.

The distinction that does matter is not the name but the source. Recording a browser tab captures that tab only. Recording the whole desktop captures everything the machine plays, including notifications. Pick the narrower source when you can, because it is the difference between a clean recording and one with a message alert in the middle of it.

Windows ships with Sound Recorder, and it records the microphone. Microsoft’s own FAQ for the app covers microphone permission and microphone volume, and never mentions system audio. To capture what Windows is playing you need either a sound card that exposes a loopback input, usually labelled Stereo Mix or What you hear, or an application that can open a WASAPI loopback stream. Audacity does the second and documents the first as sound-card dependent, so it may not exist on your machine at all.

macOS is harder, not easier. It has no built-in desktop audio recording. Audacity’s own Mac instructions send you to install Soundflower, a virtual audio device that is not compatible with Apple Silicon. On a current Mac the realistic routes are a different virtual audio device or a paid application.

Recording from a browser tab skips the driver question on both systems, because Chrome and Edge take the audio from the sharing picker rather than from a loopback device. That is the honest case for this page. It is also the honest limit: this reaches only what the picker will share, so sound from a native desktop application on a Mac is still better served by a native tool.

System capture can preserve a permitted webinar, video, game, or remote side of a call. Choose Both when you also need your microphone.

Only record material you are allowed to capture. Copyright, meeting consent, and workplace rules still apply when processing stays local.