How to Record Your Screen on a Mac for Free

macOS ships with two free, no-watermark, no-time-limit screen recorders, and most people never touch the better one. This guide covers both — the modern Cmd+Shift+5 toolbar and the older QuickTime Player route — and then walks through the single gotcha that trips up almost everyone the first time: capturing system / internal audio, which neither built-in tool does on its own.

No download required for the basics. Everything below works on any Mac running macOS Mojave (10.14) or later, which is when Apple folded screen recording into the screenshot toolbar.

Method 1: Cmd+Shift+5 (the screenshot toolbar)

This is the fastest way to record on a modern Mac, and it's what you should reach for first. Press Cmd+Shift+5 and a small floating toolbar appears near the bottom of the screen. From left to right you'll see two screenshot buttons, then two recording buttons:

• Record Entire Screen — the fourth icon. Click it, then click anywhere on the display to start recording everything.
• Record Selected Portion — the fifth icon. Click it, drag a box around the region you want, then press Record.

Before you hit record, click Options on the same toolbar. This is the part people skip, and it's where the useful settings live:

• Save to — Desktop (default), Documents, Clipboard, Mail, Messages, or another folder.
• Timer — None, 5 seconds, or 10 seconds before recording begins, so you have time to get your windows in place.
• Microphone — choose your input here (Built-in, AirPods, an external mic). If you leave this on None, your recording will have no audio at all. This is the number-one "why is my recording silent" mistake.
• Show Floating Thumbnail and Remember Last Selection — small quality-of-life toggles.

When you're done, click the Stop button in the menu bar (top-right), or press Cmd+Control+Esc. The recording saves as a .mov file wherever you set "Save to". On Apple Silicon and recent Intel Macs the output is hardware-encoded H.264 or HEVC, so files stay reasonably small.

Method 2: QuickTime Player (File → New Screen Recording)

QuickTime Player uses the same underlying capture engine but presents it differently, and it's handy when you want a clear save-and-trim step at the end. Here's the flow:

1. Open QuickTime Player (Applications, or Spotlight it).
2. From the menu bar choose File → New Screen Recording. On newer macOS this just opens the same Cmd+Shift+5 toolbar; on older versions you get QuickTime's own recording window.
3. Click the small arrow next to the red record button to pick your microphone and set quality. As with the toolbar, leaving the mic on "None" means a silent video.
4. Click Record, do your thing, then click the Stop button in the menu bar.
5. QuickTime opens the result in a playback window. Use Edit → Trim (or Cmd+T) to clip the start and end, then File → Save to name it and choose where it goes.

QuickTime's built-in Trim is genuinely useful for cutting dead air off the front and back of a take. It is, however, the only editing it offers — no arrows, no callouts, no zoom. For anything beyond a single straight cut you'll be reaching for another app.

The big gotcha: recording internal / system audio

This is where most Mac screen-recording tutorials quietly stop, because the answer is awkward: neither Cmd+Shift+5 nor QuickTime Player can record system audio. They only capture your microphone. If you record a YouTube video, a game, a video call, or any app sound, the output will be silent of that audio unless your microphone happens to pick it up out of the speakers (which sounds terrible).

The reason is architectural: macOS doesn't expose a direct path from audio output back into a recorder. To get clean internal audio you have to install a virtual audio driver that acts as a loopback — your system plays into it, and the recorder reads from it. The common options:

• BlackHole — free, open-source, actively maintained, the modern go-to. Install it, then create a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup so you can hear the audio while it's also routed to BlackHole, and select BlackHole as the recording microphone.
• Soundflower — the older free option; still works on some setups but is no longer actively developed.
• Loopback (by Rogue Amoeba) — paid, polished, with a visual routing interface if you'd rather not fiddle with Audio MIDI Setup.

It works, but it's a multi-step setup involving a kernel-level/driver install, a Multi-Output Device, and remembering to switch your audio routing back afterward. It is the single biggest friction point in free Mac screen recording, and it's worth knowing about before you record something important and discover it's silent.

What the Mac built-ins do and don't give you

For a quick capture you'll save and send as-is, the built-ins are genuinely fine — free, watermark-free, and already installed. The friction shows up the moment you need system audio + a region + a few annotations + a share link in one pass, because that's three or four separate tools stitched together on macOS today.

Where a dedicated tool fits in

If you find yourself doing screen recording often — bug reports, support replies, walkthroughs, clips to drop into an AI assistant — the gap is usually integration, not raw capture. You want region or full-screen recording, your mic and system audio together without installing a driver, simple trim, annotation, and an easy way to share, all in one place.

That's the workflow Maxisnap is built around: one lightweight app that does both screenshots and screen recording. On Windows today it records a region or the full screen with a hotkey, captures desktop audio plus microphone mixed into one track with no virtual audio cable, then opens a result window with an inline player, start/end trim, and export to MP4, GIF, WebM, or an AI-optimized MP4 — plus the same annotation tools used on screenshots.

The honest caveat for Mac readers: Maxisnap's screen recording is available on Windows today. A native Apple-Silicon macOS build is in active development and there is no Mac download yet. If you'd like a heads-up the moment the macOS version lands, leave your email on the contact page. In the meantime, the steps above are the right way to record on a Mac for free — and our Mac screen recorder guide goes deeper on the macOS-specific details.

FAQ

For more on choosing a recorder, see our best free screen recorders of 2026 roundup and the record screen with audio guide.