Record computer audio. Whatever a tab is playing, saved as a file.

At a glance

What it records, and what it cannot

Browsers let a page record a screen, a window or a tab through the same "share your screen" picker that Google Meet and Zoom use. When the thing being shared has sound and the browser is willing to pass it on, the share carries an audio track alongside the picture. This page asks for that share, throws the picture away, and records the audio track. That is the whole trick, and it is why the browser asks you to pick something in its own dialog first: no page can listen to your computer without that consent, and the browser marks the shared tab while the share lasts.

Whether the share has sound depends on the browser and on what you pick:

The tab row is the one we test: a check in this site's code opens a tab playing a known stereo tone, records it through this page in Chrome on macOS, and compares the file with what the tab played. The other rows are each browser's documented behaviour, and the page reads what actually arrived rather than trusting the table: if a share comes back without sound, it tells you which switch to look for.

A tab share carries that one tab and nothing else. Other tabs, the music app in your dock and system notification sounds are not in it, which is usually what you want. Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Arc are built on Chromium and generally behave like Chrome here, but we have not tested them.

The "Also share tab audio" switch

Almost every failed recording comes down to one control. At the bottom of Chrome's picker, under the list of tabs, there is a switch labelled Also share tab audio. Check that it is on before you press Share. With it off, the share is a silent picture and there is nothing to record. The page notices the moment the share starts and tells you, rather than letting you sit through a three-minute song for an empty file.

On Windows the Entire screen tab has its own switch, Also share system audio. That records everything the computer plays: every tab, Spotify, a game, a Teams call. Remember that it includes notification chimes too.

Picking a window rather than a tab is the other common miss. Chrome does not offer sound for a shared window, so share the tab inside it instead.

Once you press Share, Chrome switches you to the tab you picked, which is where you want to be: press play there. The recording runs on this page in the background, and the timer catches up when you come back to press Stop.

Quality: what you get is what the tab played

Most online recorders compress the audio while recording, so a stream that was already compressed once gets compressed again before you have even chosen a format. This page does not. The shared audio goes into an AudioWorklet that copies each block of samples out as 32-bit floating point, in an audio context opened at the shared track's own sample rate, so nothing is resampled on the way. Save as WAV with "match the source" and the file holds exactly those floats. FLAC "match the source" writes 24-bit, whose rounding sits far below anything audible.

We measured how close that gets. A tab playing a stereo test tone, 440 Hz on the left and 660 Hz on the right, was recorded through this page and the saved WAV compared sample by sample with what the tab played: every sample was within 0.00000015 of the original (−136 dB), which is floating-point rounding in Chrome's capture path, and the two channels stayed apart. The length of the file matched the time it ran.

The settings this page asks for are not the browser's defaults, and that matters. Asked for plain "audio", Chrome treats a tab like a microphone on a call: it hands the sound over in mono, at 48 kHz, with echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain switched on. In our test a tone playing at half of full scale came through that default path at anywhere from a tenth to three fifths of its level, different on every run as the processing worked on it. A recorder that does not ask for anything else gets exactly that. This page turns all three off and asks for two channels, which is how the tone above arrived intact.

What you cannot recover is anything the tab never had. A YouTube video or a Spotify web stream is already lossy compressed by the time it plays; recording it losslessly preserves exactly that, no better. If you only need to listen to it later, MP3 at 320 kbps or V0 costs one more generation and will not be audible to most people. If it is going into an editor or a DAW for more work, keep WAV or FLAC and make the MP3 at the very end.

Compared with OBS, Audacity and BlackHole

OBS Studio records "Desktop Audio" alongside video and is the right tool if you also want the picture, or several sources mixed with levels. It is a large install to record one stream's sound.

Audacity on Windows can record the system output with no extra software: set the audio host to Windows WASAPI and choose the output device marked (loopback) as the recording device. That captures everything the computer plays, like the "system audio" switch here, and you get Audacity's editor for what comes next.

On a Mac, recording system audio has traditionally needed a virtual audio driver. BlackHole is a free, open-source one; you route the output to it (usually through a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup so you can still hear) and record from it in any app. Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack and Loopback are the paid, polished version of the same idea. Both take an install and a driver permission, and both can record any app, not just a browser tab.

This page is for the case where the sound is already in a browser tab and you want it as a file now, with nothing installed. If you find yourself recording desktop apps regularly, one of the above will serve you better.

Limits worth knowing

It records in real time. A 40-minute lecture takes 40 minutes to capture, and the tab has to keep playing for that long. What is recorded is the tab's own output, so the player's volume slider in that tab changes the level of the recording.

The recording lives in memory until you save it. Float stereo at 48 kHz is about 23 MB per minute, so an hour is around 1.4 GB. The size so far shows under the buttons while you record. For long sessions, stop and save every half hour or so; closing or reloading the tab loses anything unsaved.

"Stop sharing" in the browser's bar is the same as Stop. The page keeps everything recorded up to that point, as it does if the shared tab is closed.

Only record what you have the right to. Capturing a stream for your own listening can still breach the service's terms, and redistributing it usually breaches copyright. A lecture or meeting may need everyone's consent before it is recorded, depending on where you are.