How to record any meeting on your mac, using Quicktime (free)
In the current day world of remote working, doing interviews and user testing has also gone remote. In working for a design consultancy, we often work with different clients, that use different tools for video meetings. Not all of these will allow you to record.
We also rely on external tools to make the transcription and tagging process more efficient (think of tools like Dovetail or Otter.ai). These tools give a real performance boost to our teams BUT: we need a good and clean recording of a meeting to use them. When built-in recording is not available, our teams have come up with lots of MacGyver style workarounds, but each of them have their drawbacks.
In this article I will walk you through a simple 5 step process for recording anything on your mac, including meeting audio and your own voice at the same time. We’re going to use QuickTime for recording.
Step 1: install Blackhole 2ch
Blackhole is a plugin for you mac that allows you to route audio from one source to another source. We need this for QuickTime to be able to ‘hear’ the output of your meeting. Go to https://existential.audio/blackhole/, register, download and install Blackhole onto your mac.
When prompted download the Blackhole 2ch version.
Step 2: create a ‘Multi-output Device’
You need to create a special output on your system, that allows the audio to go into both your Headphones and Quicktime. For this step you have to open the Audio Midi Setup application on your mac, just type Midi into spotlight to find it. Once started, click the little ‘+’ on the bottom left corner and click Create Multi-output Device. Once created, select your preferred sound output device (in my case the WH-1000XM2 headphones) and also select BlackHole.
Step 3: prepare Quicktime
Start Quicktime and select New Screen Recording from the File menu.
From the floating Quicktime menu at the bottom of your screen, select BlackHole 2ch as your Microphone.
Step 4: Select the right sound output for your Mac from Control Centre
Open Control Centre and click on the arrow on the right side of the Sound controls.
From the dropdown that appears, select the Multi-Output Device that we created earlier as your system output.
Step 5: Hit record!
You’re all set, the only thing left to do is to hit Record whenever you want to start recording. Happy user testing!
Don’t forget to switch back your audio output to your favorite device when you are done.
