Since macOS Mojave you can easily record videos from your screen. However, the screen recordings does not capture output sound. For example, if you are playing a video with sound on your screen that you want to capture, the screen recordings falls short. This guide shows you how to record a screen video with sound on macOS.
Take a screenshot
macOS has a fantastic built-in ability to take screenshots with hotkeys. You can either save the screenshot to the Desktop, or save to the Clipboard for easy pasting. When you save to the Desktop, the screenshot will show up in the bottom right corner of your screen, ready for you to hit the edit button to e.g. add some markers.
The hotkeys to save the result as a file named Screen Shot [date] at [time].png to the Desktop are:
- If you want to capture the whole screen:
shift ⇧+command ⌘+3 - If you want to capture a portion of the screen:
shift ⇧+command ⌘+4 - If you want to capture a window or menu press the space bar afterwards:
shift ⇧+command ⌘+4+space
To save the result to the Clipboard simply add the ctrl button to the hotkeys:
- If you want to capture the whole screen:
shift ⇧+ctrl+command ⌘+3 - If you want to capture a portion of the screen:
shift ⇧+ctrl+command ⌘+4 - If you want to capture a window or menu press the space bar afterwards:
shift ⇧+ctrl+command ⌘+4+space
Record the screen
Likewise taking a screenshot, recording the screen to a video is rather easy since macOS Mojave. To record a portion or the whole screen first enter into the Screenshot Toolbar using the hotkey shift⇧ + command⌘ + 5. Using the on-screen control of the Screenshot Toolbar you can either record the full screen
or record a selected portion of the screen using a rectangle select box
After recording, the video will show up in the bottom right of your screen, ready to edit, trim, share and save.
If you record a video playing on your screen, you will only capture the video but no output sound. However, it is possible to capture input sound from your mic using the Settings menu shown in the Screenshot Toolbar. That would be useful if you want to comment on the video, e.g. if you would record a tutorial. But that is capturing the input sound, no the output sound.
Record a screen video with sound
To capture the output sound you need to install third-party software. I recommend the tool Background Music. To install either
- Use Homebrew, open a new Terminal window and run:
brew install --cask background-music - Or download from the GitHub repository at https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic and install the
.pkgfile.
After installation, in Screen Recording you will see an option for Mikrophone called Background Music. If you choose this option, the screen recording will also capture the System output audio.
