How to use Soundflower to capture audio on a Mac

One of the few things I missed when moving from PC to Mac was not being able to record sound from the computer. I didn’t want to pay for Audio Hijack Pro even though it’s only $32.

Then I discovered Soundflower, a free application for routing audio. It works pretty well. Here’s how I set it up.

  1. Download and install Soundflower.
  2. Open Audacity, the free audio editing software.
  3. Go to Audacity > preferences and in the Audio I/O tab select Soundflower (2ch) as the recording device.
  4. If you are recording from a web browser, you need to set the Mac’s general sound setting as well: System Preferences > Sound > Output > Soundflower (2ch). Web browsers inherit these settings from the operating system.
  5. Click record in Audacity.
  6. Press play on your audio.
  7. Whatever is playing in your browser will record now be recorded in Audacity.

That’s it. ‘Hope you find it useful.