Guide

How to record game audio without your Discord call

By Dylan Buck ·

Three slim glass panels glowing amber, blue and red on a pale surface, each etched with a sound wave.

You clip a good round, watch it back, and your friend is talking over the entire thing. Or the opposite: the callout was the best part and it is not in the file at all. Both are the same problem, and on macOS it has a specific cause and a specific fix.

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:

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