The question that decides it: before or after?

Every screen recorder falls into one of two groups. Prospective tools record from the moment you press start, so you have to know beforehand that something worth keeping is about to happen. Retroactive tools — instant replay, replay buffers, "save the last N seconds" — are always holding the recent past in memory, so you press the button after the thing has already happened.

Almost all the frustration people have with Mac recording comes from using a prospective tool for a retroactive job. You cannot know that the next thirty seconds will contain the best round of your life. If that is the problem you have, skip to the last section, because the first four options do not solve it.

1. Screenshot toolbar (Shift-Command-5)

Built into macOS since Mojave. Press Shift-Command-5, choose Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion, and press Record. The file lands on your desktop as a .mov when you stop.

Good for: a quick capture of something you are looking at right now, with no install and no configuration. Bad for: gaming. It records the whole screen or a rectangle of it, so notifications, your menu bar and anything on a second display are in the file. It does not capture audio from your applications without extra software. And it is entirely prospective.

2. QuickTime Player

File, then New Screen Recording. Functionally the same capture path as the screenshot toolbar on modern macOS, with a more familiar window around it and easy trimming afterwards.

Good for: recording a session you intend to edit down later. Bad for: the same reasons, plus QuickTime writes uncompressed or lightly compressed files that get very large very quickly. A long session can fill a drive.

3. OBS Studio

Free, open source, and by far the most capable thing on this list. OBS can capture a specific window, mix several sources, stream, and — importantly for this discussion — it has a Replay Buffer, which is a genuine retroactive recorder.

The catch is that none of that is on by default. OBS opens with a blank scene; you add sources and confirm your audio devices before anything is captured at all. The Replay Buffer then has to be enabled in Settings under Output, given a length, and bound to hotkeys for Start Replay Buffer and Save Replay Buffer. And it does not arm itself: you press Start Replay Buffer every session, and if you forget, the moment you wanted was never in memory to save.

Good for: anyone who streams, needs multiple sources, or is already comfortable in OBS. It is free and it is genuinely excellent. Bad for: the case where you just want a clip and do not want to operate a broadcast console. Also worth knowing: isolating a single application's audio is not something OBS does natively on macOS, which is why so many Mac OBS guides end with "install an audio routing driver". The full comparison is here.

4. Steam's built-in Game Recording

Steam added its own recording feature, including a background mode that keeps recent gameplay so you can clip after the fact. If the game you play is launched through Steam, this is free and already installed.

Good for: Steam games, if you are happy inside Steam's overlay and its clip library. Bad for: everything that is not a Steam game. A large share of Mac gaming happens outside Steam entirely — App Store titles, launchers like Battle.net, emulators such as RPCS3, Dolphin and RetroArch, games running through CrossOver or the Game Porting Toolkit, and browser games. Steam structurally cannot record any of those, because it only knows about games it launched.

5. A dedicated instant-replay app

This is the category NVIDIA created with ShadowPlay on Windows and Medal built a company on. The app holds the last N seconds of your game in a memory buffer, continuously discarding anything older, and writes a file when you press a key. Nothing touches your disk until you do.

On Windows there are several. On macOS the category was empty for years: ShadowPlay is NVIDIA hardware and has never run on a Mac, Xbox Game Bar is Windows-only, and Medal's own support documentation says it does not support macOS at all. RetroClip did it well and stopped being updated in 2020.

Hindsight is our answer to that. It sits in the menu bar, holds 15 seconds to 5 minutes of a single game window, and writes an .mp4 in about a second when you press ⌥⇧C — including from inside a fullscreen game. Because it captures one window rather than your screen, notifications and your second display are never in the clip, and it can record that game's audio without your Discord call.

So which one?

• You know in advance and just need a file: Shift-Command-5. It is already there.
• You stream, or need multiple sources: OBS Studio, and nothing else comes close.
• You only play Steam games and live in Steam: Steam's own Game Recording.
• You want to clip things that already happened, in any game: an instant-replay app.

Two things that catch people out on macOS

Permission. Every one of these tools needs Screen & System Audio Recording permission in System Settings, under Privacy & Security. macOS also re-confirms it periodically, so a prompt reappearing for an app you already approved is normal and clicking Allow keeps the existing grant.

Audio. macOS has historically had no way to record another application's sound, which is why older guides tell you to install a virtual audio driver like BlackHole or Loopback. That is no longer strictly true: ScreenCaptureKit can capture a single application's audio when you capture that application's window, which is how per-app audio works without a driver. Whether a given tool uses it is another matter. More on that here.

Why macOS mixes everything together

A Mac has no "record only this app's sound" switch in the operating system. What comes out of the speakers is a single mixed stream: your game, Discord, Spotify, a notification chime, a browser tab you forgot about. By the time audio reaches the output device it has already been combined, and no recorder reading that output can separate it again.

This is why, for a decade, every Mac recording guide ended the same way: install a virtual audio driver. Tools like BlackHole, Loopback or Soundflower create a fake output device, you route applications into it, and the recorder captures that instead. It works, and it is genuinely clever, but it means installing a kernel-level audio driver, re-routing your sound, and then remembering to put it back when you want to listen to music normally.

What changed

Apple's ScreenCaptureKit, which is the modern framework behind screen recording on macOS, can capture audio per application. When a recorder captures a specific application's window rather than your whole display, it can ask the system for that application's audio in isolation — before it has been mixed with everything else.

That is the whole trick, and it has two consequences worth understanding:

• It requires a window capture, not a display capture. If a tool is recording your whole screen, there is no single application to isolate audio from, so you get the full system mix. This is not a setting anyone can toggle around; it follows from what a display capture is.
• It needs no extra software. No virtual device, no routing, nothing to uninstall later. Your speakers keep behaving normally while the recording gets a clean feed.

Getting the game and not the call

In practice, whatever tool you use, the recipe is the same:

1. Capture the game's window, not the display it happens to be on.
2. Set the audio source to the captured application only, rather than system audio.
3. Put your microphone on its own track if you want your own voice, so you can decide later rather than at record time.

In Hindsight those are two switches in Settings under Audio, and the microphone is a third. A window capture defaults to that game's audio alone, which is the case people want most of the time; one setting flips it to the entire system when the callouts are the reason you are clipping at all.

When you actually want the whole mix

Do not over-correct. A clip of a squad wipe is often better with four people shouting over it, and a reaction is not a reaction without the voices. The reason to separate them is not that voice is noise; it is that recording them separately means the choice is still available afterwards. Recording the mix bakes the decision in at the moment you are least able to think about it.

What about the other people on the call?

Worth a sentence, because it is a real question and not only a technical one. Recording a voice call means recording other people, and consent rules for that vary by country and by US state — some require every participant to agree. Whether your friends mind is usually the more immediate consideration, but the legal position is not uniform, and "it was in the game clip" is not a defence anywhere. Our terms put the same point more formally.

Quick reference

• Game only, no Discord: window capture, audio set to the captured application.
• Game plus callouts: display capture, or a window capture with system audio.
• Your voice too, but removable later: microphone as a separate track.
• Still on an older tool that cannot do any of this: a virtual audio driver is still the fallback, and still works.

What the permission is

It is called Screen & System Audio Recording, and it lives in System Settings under Privacy & Security. Without it, macOS will not let an application see the contents of any window it does not own. An app without the permission does not get a degraded picture or a black rectangle with a warning: it gets nothing.

The reason it is guarded this heavily is that screen contents are the most revealing thing on a computer. Everything else you protect with a password is on screen at some point after you have typed it — your email, your bank, your messages, your password manager while it is unlocked. A screen recorder is, by definition, an app that can watch all of it.

Granting it

1. Open System Settings, then Privacy & Security.
2. Choose Screen & System Audio Recording.
3. Turn the switch on for the app.

Older versions of macOS required you to quit and reopen the app afterwards. That is no longer necessary in general, and a well-built app notices the grant the moment it happens — Hindsight detects it during onboarding and moves on without asking you to restart anything.

Why it keeps asking again

This is the part that feels like a malfunction and is not. Recent versions of macOS re-confirm screen recording permission periodically, even for applications you have already approved. Apple's reasoning is reasonable enough: a permission granted once, two years ago, to an app you no longer remember installing, is not really informed consent.

So the prompt returning is expected. Clicking Allow keeps the existing grant — you are not re-granting from scratch and nothing is reset.

What is not expected is the prompt appearing on every single launch. That usually means the permission entry has become inconsistent, often after an app was moved, replaced by an update, or restored from a backup. The fix is to rebuild the entry:

1. Go to Privacy & Security, then Screen & System Audio Recording.
2. Select the app and remove it with the minus button.
3. Launch the app again and grant the permission when it asks.

Why a recorder must be in /Applications

Permission is tied to the app's identity and its location. Running a recorder from your Downloads folder, or from the disk image it arrived on, produces exactly the symptoms above: permission that appears to be granted but does not persist. Drag the app to Applications first, then grant.

How to tell it is actually working

A screen recorder that lacks permission usually cannot tell you so in an obvious way, because from its point of view the capture simply produces nothing. Look for a signal in the app itself rather than trusting the settings window: Hindsight dims its menu bar mark when the permission is missing, and the buffer readout in the sidebar stays at zero rather than counting up. If the readout is climbing, capture is genuinely running.

What the permission does not grant

Worth being precise, because "it can see my screen" sounds alarming and the scope is narrower than it sounds.

• Microphone is separate. A different permission, asked for separately, and only if an app records your voice.
• Camera is separate. Screen recording permission grants no camera access at all.
• It does not imply network access. An app can be permitted to see your screen and still never send anything anywhere. Hindsight's App Store build makes no network requests whatsoever, and you can revoke the permission at any time to stop capture immediately.

If you want the specifics of what a recorder on your machine can reach, ours are written out on the security page.