How to Record Your Mac Screen With Audio

The fastest way to capture audio is Apple's built-in Screenshot toolbar. Press Shift-Command-5, click Options, and choose your microphone under the Microphone heading so your narration is recorded alongside the picture. Pick "Record Entire Screen" or "Record Selected Portion," hit Record, and stop from the menu bar or with Control-Command-Escape. The result is a .mov saved to your Desktop with your voice baked in. This is perfect for a quick talk-through, and QuickTime Player's File menu offers the same New Screen Recording flow with an identical microphone picker if you prefer that interface.

System audio, the sound coming out of your Mac, is the tricky part, because macOS does not expose internal audio to screen recorders by default. Install a free loopback driver like BlackHole, then open Audio MIDI Setup and create a Multi-Output Device that plays to both your speakers and BlackHole. Select BlackHole as the input in the Shift-Command-5 microphone menu and macOS will capture app audio and video calls. Commercial tools like Loopback do the same with a friendlier interface. Once configured, your recording carries both the on-screen action and the system sound.

Here is where Limelight fits. Limelight is a native macOS screen recorder that does not record audio yet, no microphone and no system sound. Instead it focuses entirely on the visuals: it auto-zooms into every click, smooths the cursor into clean motion, and renders your capture on a clean padded background. It also bakes on-screen keystrokes, a cursor spotlight, and freehand annotations directly into the video, which most Mac recorders, including Screen Studio, do not do. So the practical workflow is to record narration separately and pair it with a polished Limelight clip.

To combine them, record your voice with Shift-Command-5 or a voice memo, record the same walkthrough in Limelight, then line the audio up with the video in iMovie or any editor. Limelight's built-in editor lets you trim, cut, ripple-delete, speed up, and adjust zoom so the visuals match your narration timing before you export. Export to mp4 for tutorials or a vertical 9:16 clip for social. Limelight is free to start with the cursor spotlight; Pro is $2.99/month or a $34 one-time lifetime license. You get studio-grade visuals plus clean audio without paying for an all-in-one that muddles both.