How to record your screen on a Mac, with audio

macOS ships two ways to record your screen: the screenshot toolbar (⇧⌘5) and QuickTime Player. Both capture pixels well, and both leave you with a flat .mov file, no way to record your Mac's own audio, and nothing to make the recording easier to watch.

This guide uses Flicka, a Chrome extension. Its popup is one sentence — Record this tab with my mic and auto‑zoom — you press the shutter, then land in an editor that has already added zooms, a backdrop and cursor effects, and export an MP4, WebM or GIF. Nothing is uploaded: the capture, editing and encoding all happen on your Mac.

What you need before you start

• Chrome, Edge, Arc or Brave with Flicka for Chrome added. Free; no account is needed to record.
• Screen recording permission for that browser. macOS asks the first time the browser shares your screen. If you dismissed it, open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording (called Screen Recording on older macOS), turn the browser on, and relaunch it.
• Microphone and camera permission if you want your voice or face. The browser asks when you turn those on.

Step 1: Choose what to record

Open the page you want to record and click the Flicka icon in the toolbar (or press Alt+Shift+F). The popup is one sentence, and each highlighted word opens a short list: what to record, what to listen to, whether clicks become zooms. The small print underneath holds the rest — webcam, time limit, count-in.

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1. 1What to recordThis tab is the sharpest for web demos and needs no share dialog. The whole screen records everything you see, one window follows one app, part of this tab is a box you draw, and just my camera is you.
2. 2What to listen toMy mic, the tab's audio, both (mixed into one track you can rebalance later) or a silent take.
3. 3Auto-zoomTurns your clicks into zooms when the take opens in the editor.
4. 4WebcamRecords your camera to its own track so the bubble stays editable — see adding a webcam overlay.
5. 5Count-inThree seconds by default, so you can get into position; or start straight away.
6. 6The shutterStarts the take. Hold it instead to grab a still of the page for the annotator. Alt+Shift+R starts and stops from anywhere.
7. 7LibraryEvery take and shot, on this Mac, in the editor's own tab.

On a Mac, this tab is usually the best choice for product demos: the result is sharp at any size, the tab's own audio comes along, and there is no share dialog at all.

Step 2: Press the shutter and count down

For the whole screen or one window, Chrome shows its share dialog: pick the screen or window, tick Also share system audio if you want sound, and click Share. Either way Flicka then counts down from three on the page you're recording, so you can get into position.

Step 3: Record, mark up, stop

While you record, a small bar sits at the bottom of the page: the timer, pause, the mic, the word Mark up and Stop. Everything you can draw with lives under Mark up — pen, shapes, text, blur, cursor effects — and everything about the take lives under the timer: start over, throw it away, fade the bar. The bar is part of the page, so in a tab recording it is in the picture; fade it, drag it into a corner, or leave it — many people like the timer in the video.

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1. 1TimerElapsed recording time, excluding pauses. It opens the take's own list: start over, throw away, fade the bar.
2. 2PausePause and resume without starting a new take.
3. 3MicMute and unmute, or hold U to talk. If the mic hears nothing for ten seconds, Flicka says so.
4. 4Mark upOne word for every tool. Keys 1–8 switch tools while the panel is open.
5. 5Pen and friendsPen, highlighter, arrow, box, oval, line, text and eraser, with colours and three weights below.
6. 6BlurClick anything on the page to blur it for the recording — an email address, a name, a key.
7. 7StopFinish. The recording opens straight in the editor. Alt+Shift+R does the same from anywhere.

Step 4: Polish it in the editor

When you stop, the recording opens in the editor already styled: a gradient backdrop, rounded corners, a soft shadow, and zooms on the clicks Flicka saw.

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1. 1LibraryBack to all your takes. Everything is saved automatically in your browser.
2. 2Take summaryHow many zooms and cuts the take has, and how many were added automatically.
3. 3Tool railAim a zoom, cut, crop, or place the webcam directly on the canvas.
4. 4SettingsLook, Motion and Sound panels. Press Tab to open them.
5. 5TimelinePlay with Space, step with the arrow keys, and scrub to any moment.
6. 6ExportRender the finished video. More on that in the export guide.

Three edits make the biggest difference: trim the dead seconds at the start and end, check each zoom lands on the right thing (see how auto-zoom works), and pick a backdrop that fits where the video is going.

Step 5: Export an MP4

Click Export, choose a target such as YouTube, and render. Encoding runs on your Mac while you keep editing; a chip in the header tracks progress and saves the file when it's done.

Flicka vs. the built-in Mac tools

If you only need a quick clip for yourself, ⇧⌘5 is fine. When the recording is for someone else — a demo, a tutorial, a bug report, a launch video — the polish is where the time goes, and that's the part Flicka automates.