Press the button, and you are recording about two seconds later. Voice notes, interviews, practice takes, a quick microphone test. Capture it, trim it, and save it as MP3 or WAV.
Tap to start recording
Your browser will ask for microphone access first
Starting a recording means you accept our Terms of Use. Recordings live only in this browser tab, and we cannot recover audio that was never downloaded.
Local only No account No uploads No time cap No paywall
Four steps, no manual required. The whole thing happens on your own machine.
Press the round button, then choose Allow in the small prompt your browser shows. That prompt belongs to the browser, not to us, and recording begins the moment you accept.
The waveform moves as sound comes in, so you can see instantly that the right mic is live. Pause whenever you need a break; the takes are stitched back together with no seam.
Pull the two handles on the waveform inward to cut the dead space at the top and tail. One press of Remove silent parts strips out the long gaps in between.
Pick MP3 if you are sending it to someone, or WAV if it is headed into an editor. The download lands in your normal downloads folder.
Everything below runs on web standards your browser already ships with.
Capture, playback, trimming and encoding all happen inside the tab through the Web Audio API. There is no upload step, so there is no copy of your audio on any server.
Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari can all do this natively. No extension to approve, no installer to trust, no updates to chase.
There is no built-in cut-off at 5, 10 or 60 minutes. The practical limit is how much free memory your device has, which usually means hours.
Compressed MP3 for sharing, uncompressed WAV for editing in Audacity or Audition, or the raw WebM capture if you want the smallest file.
Stop for a phone call, a coughing fit or a page turn, then carry on. Interviews and long lectures rarely run start to finish in one go.
Safari on iPhone and iPad, Chrome on Android. Open the page, tap record, download to the device. No app store detour.
Laptop mic, USB condenser, headset, audio interface. If your system can see it, the dropdown lists it, and you can switch before you start.
The moving waveform is a sanity check: too flat and your mic is muted or too far away, too tall and you are clipping.
Drag the in and out points directly. Only what sits between them plays back and only that region ends up in the exported file.
Detects and drops the long pauses automatically, with conservative, medium and aggressive thresholds so you can match it to how you speak.
A browser tab is perfect for some jobs and hopeless for others. Here is the honest breakdown of the families of recording software, and where each one earns its place.
Web pages that use the MediaRecorder API, like the one at the top of this page. Fastest possible route from "I need to record this" to a finished file, and nothing gets installed. The trade-off: microphone input only, and everything lives in volatile memory until you download it.
Sound Recorder on Windows 11, Voice Memos on macOS and iOS, the recorder app on most Android phones. Already installed, dependable, and they keep a library of past recordings. Editing is limited to trimming, and quality options are usually minimal.
Desktop programs such as Audacity and Ocenaudio. These record and repair: noise reduction, normalisation, fades, format conversion, batch processing. This is the category most people should install if they record more than once a week.
REAPER, Adobe Audition, Logic Pro, GarageBand, Cakewalk, Studio One. Multitrack timelines, plugin chains, punch-in recording, real mixing. Overkill for a voice memo, essential for music and for anything with several people or several layers.
OBS Studio, Audio Hijack, and the loopback drivers that go with them. This is the only category that reliably records what your computer is playing: a video call, a stream, browser audio, a game. Browser recorders cannot do this.
Not software at all, but worth knowing about. A Zoom or Tascam handheld records to an SD card with better preamps than any laptop, and it keeps working when a computer crashes. Journalists and musicians still swear by them for good reason.
Want the long version, with a decision table? Read the full audio recording software guide.
Eight programs you can install on a PC or Mac today. What each one is genuinely good at, what it costs, and who should skip it.
The default answer for free recording and editing. Multitrack, endless effects, noise reduction that genuinely rescues bad rooms. The interface is dated and the project format is its own thing, but nothing else free comes close on capability.
Read the Audacity reviewWhat Audacity would feel like if it were designed this decade. Effects preview in real time, huge files open instantly, and the learning curve is about ten minutes. No multitrack, which is the one thing holding it back.
Read the Ocenaudio reviewThe way to record system audio and microphone at the same time, on separate tracks, for free. Built for streaming, so the setup is fiddly, but for capturing a call or anything playing on your screen it is unbeaten at the price.
Read the OBS Studio reviewThe professional's cleanup room. Spectral editing lets you paint out a cough or a chair squeak that no filter would catch, and the Essential Sound panel gets spoken word broadcast-ready fast. You are renting it, forever.
Read the Audition reviewA complete professional DAW in a download smaller than most phone apps, with a generous evaluation period and an unusually honest licence. Endlessly customisable, which is also why it can feel intimidating on day one.
Read the REAPER reviewFree with every Mac and iPhone, and far more capable than the "toy" label suggests. Multitrack recording, real plugins, and a straight upgrade path into Logic Pro. Apple-only, and podcast-specific tools have thinned out over the years.
Read the GarageBand reviewAlready on your PC, opens in a second, and the Windows 11 rewrite added format choice, device selection and markers. Perfect for lectures and memos. Do not expect it to fix a noisy recording afterwards.
Read the Sound Recorder reviewA deep toolbox of effects, batch conversion and restoration tools wrapped in a very insistent sales funnel. Worth a look if a specific feature draws you in; read the licence terms carefully before you rely on the free version.
Read the WavePad reviewSide-by-side comparison and buying advice: the software guide.
Most sessions on this page fall into one of these. Each one has a matching software recommendation if you outgrow the browser.
Say it faster than you could type it. Ideas, shopping lists, a paragraph you want to hear out loud before you write it down.
Keep a copy of the session so your notes can stay short. Ask the lecturer first. Most say yes, and some institutions require it.
Face-to-face conversations, with pause available whenever the coffee arrives. For remote calls, use OBS Studio instead.
Capture the riff before it evaporates. A rough phone-quality memo of a good idea beats a perfect recording of one you forgot.
Record a phrase, play it back beside a native speaker's version, repeat. Hearing yourself is the part most learners skip.
New headset, new interface, new mic arm. Twenty seconds here tells you whether it sounds right before an important call.
Record in-room discussions, then run the file through a transcription service so decisions become searchable text.
A grandparent's story, a child's first song, a birthday message. Download it and back it up somewhere that is not a browser tab.
Three buttons, three very different files. This is the short version.
| Format | Typical size | Quality | Pick it for | Opens in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MP3 | Roughly 1 MB per minute | Lossy, very good for speech | Email, chat, uploads, anything you send to another person | Everything: phones, cars, smart speakers, every OS |
| WAV | Roughly 10 MB per minute | Lossless, untouched | Further editing, noise reduction, mastering, archiving | Audacity, Audition, REAPER, GarageBand, VLC |
| WebM | Smallest of the three | Lossy (Opus) | Keeping the raw capture exactly as the browser made it | Chrome, Firefox, VLC, ffmpeg |
Rule of thumb: if a person is going to listen to it, export MP3. If a program is going to process it, export WAV.
Privacy, formats, limits, and the difference between recording a mic and recording your computer.
Yes. No trial period, no premium tier, no export limit and no card details. You can record as often and as long as you like.
No. The page uses the MediaRecorder API and Web Audio API that Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari already ship with. There is no extension to add and no installer to run.
No sign-up, no email address, no password. The record button works the moment the page loads.
No. Capture, playback, trimming and MP3 encoding all happen inside your browser tab. When you press Download, the browser writes the file to your disk directly. There is no copy of it anywhere else, including with us.
Three, and they suit different jobs:
When in doubt, MP3.
Nothing is capped in the app. Because the audio is held in memory until you export it, the real limit is your device's free RAM, which in practice means hours rather than minutes. For very long unattended sessions, a desktop program that writes to disk as it records is the safer choice.
Yes. Safari on iOS 14.3+ and Chrome on Android both support browser recording. Open this page on the phone, tap the button, and the finished file downloads to the device.
Not through a microphone recorder like this one, because browsers deliberately only expose mic input here. To capture what your computer is playing you have two routes:
Both are covered in the software guide.
Move to a desktop program when you need any of these:
Start with Audacity or Ocenaudio if the budget is zero, and look at REAPER or Adobe Audition when it is not.
It depends on the job, but three cover almost everything:
All three are compared in the software guide.
Yes. Press Pause, deal with whatever came up, then press Resume. The segments are joined into a single continuous file and you will not hear the join.
Both, without leaving the page. Drag the handles on the waveform to set your in and out points, then use Remove silent parts at one of three thresholds:
The result plays back immediately, and one click undoes it if you cut too much.
Nine times out of ten the browser grabbed the wrong input: a webcam mic across the room rather than the headset on your head. Fixes, in order:
The software guide walks through every category, from the free editors to the professional DAWs, and tells you which one fits the recording you are actually trying to make.