Guide
How to record game audio without your Discord call
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
The signal sent to a Mac's speakers is a single mixed stream: your game, Discord, Spotify, a notification chime, and any browser tab you forgot about. By the time audio reaches that output device it has already been combined, and a recorder reading only that mixed output cannot separate it again.
This is why, for a decade, every Mac recording guide ended the same way: install a virtual audio device. Tools like BlackHole or Loopback create an additional audio route, you send applications into it, and the recorder captures that route instead. It works, but it adds routing that has to be configured and understood when another app cannot hear the device you expected.
What changed
Apple's ScreenCaptureKit, the modern framework for screen capture on macOS, provides fine-grained filters for displays, applications, and windows and can deliver audio with the selected stream. A recorder can use that filtering to take the game's audio before it is reduced to the speaker mix.
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:
- Capture the game's window, not the display it happens to be on.
- Set the audio source to the captured application only, rather than system audio.
- 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.