When I’m composing songs I like to sing my lyrics then listen to my singing. I also sometimes share with friends. I know how to do that on my iPhone, but is there a way I can easily record myself on my iMac?
It turns out that there are a lot of reasons that you might want to record a voice memo, speech, story, or song on your Mac system, and for many people, it’s even easier than using a mobile device. Fortunately, Apple has you covered with the same app that appears on iOS and iPadOS: Voice Memo. As long as your Mac has a microphone and the app has permission to access it (it will prompt you if it doesn’t) then it’s quite a simple process.
Of course, as with all audio recordings, best practice is to have the environment be as quiet as possible and to sit reasonably close to the computer so that you’ll get the best results. If you want, you can plug in an external microphone, wired or wireless, then just pop into Settings > Sound > Input and ensure that it’s selected as the audio input device. You can even use a gaming headset if you have one handy!
BASICS OF MAC VOICE MEMOS
Open up Applications and you’ll find “Voice Memos” at the bottom of your (alphabetically sorted!) list of applications on your iMac or MacBook. Launch it and you’ll be presented with a very minimalist interface:
I have a recording I made a while ago that’s 0:37 seconds long. But let’s record something new. Click on the red button to begin a recording. The screen immediately changes to show the waveform from the audio input:
If you don’t see any red lines at all, it can’t “hear” you, so check for input device settings, make sure you don’t have mute enabled, etc. Should work just fine, however.
Done chatting, telling a story, singing your new song, or capturing your child babbling happily? A click on the pause button (two vertical red bars button on the lower left) can temporarily pause it if you want to take a deep breath, and a second press resumes recording. If you’re really done, “Done” stops the recording.
Notice now that it shows up on the left side, with the date and duration (mine’s 7 seconds long). You can hear what’s been recorded with the triangular Play button. Cool, right?
WORKING WITH YOUR RECORDING
What’s worth noting are all the buttons that have appeared along the top bar of the app. They offer quite a lot of controls. Leftmost is “share”, but I’ll get back to that in a moment. You can ❤️ a recording, delete it, go to settings, get a transcript, or Edit the recording. Yes, Voice Memos gives you some rudimentary edit controls.
You can also right-click (oops, sorry, Control+Click) on the recording itself to bring up a small menu of options:
I like to trim my recordings to ensure that they start and stop at the best possible points, so I’m going to select “Trim Recording” from this menu.
It’s easy to use this feature: Click and drag on the dark yellow edge bar on the lower graphic to move it to where you actually start and end talking or singing. A click on the “Trim” button then lets you listen to what you’ve done. Good? Click on “Apply” and you can either update your recording or save it as a new recording entirely.
TRANSCRIPT AND SHARING / SAVING
One of the slick new features added to Voice Memos with MacOS 15.0 Sequoia is that it can generate a transcript of an audio recording too. This is great for having grandpa tell stories about his childhood then instantly turning it into text you can share with family members. Click on the Quote button on the top. Here’s what mine produces:
You can listen to my recording to compare what I said with the transcript if you’d like!
The biggest question most people have at this point in the process is how do I save it as a separate file? This is a bit more complicated than necessary. You might be thinking “Ah! Share it to my desktop?” but…
Lots of options, but nothing as simple as “Save As…”. Instead, simply drag and drop the file onto your Desktop:
You’ll then have an .m4a format audio file:
And that’s it. Not too difficult. Good luck with your songwriting!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about MacOS since the first release and have hundreds of helpful tutorials here on the site. Please check out my Mac help library for lots more useful content while you’re here!