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No audio in gameplay captured by QuickTime Player

imrazor

imrazor

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 8, 2010
403
120
Dol Amroth
I was trying to capture some gameplay footage of Baldur's Gate 3 to try and demonstrate some of the visual glitches in this early access game. The video portion captured fine, but I got no audio. I don't see any options to capture "desktop audio", only a microphone option. Is that truly my only option? Would that capture the game audio, as well as anything I might say? Why do I not see an option to capture on-board audio?
 
QuickTime screen recording by default can only capture input audio sources, and capturing the computer’s output audio is not supported. There are tools for macOS that can create input devices from outgoing audio, essentially acting as an intermediate audio device, capturing audio output, and sending it both as an input signal and an output signal (see the MIDI control app that ships with macOS for an overview of audio input output devices). It is many, many years since I’ve had to set up something like this but back then there was something, I think it was called AudioBed

There are also full packaged utilities that manage both audio and video capture like Screenflow, but I’ve not come across a free one. Alternatively external capture units, but that’s a hardware solution, though it can offer lower latency than software capture
But if it’s not for professional streaming, just look into the first suggestion :)
 
You want to use the Soundflower plugin along with the Audio Midi Setup app in macOS to create preset that allows for capture of audio output.
This guide should be able to help you:

How to Record Application Audio With Soundflower (with Pictures)

In this Wikihow article you will learn how to use Soundflower in conjunction with Audacity to record audio from an application on a computer running Mac Os X. Yes, even Skype. Download Soundflower from code.google.com Once there you should...
www.wikihow.com

Make sure to change the audio from 44.1 khz to 48.
Good luck!
 
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Sharewaredemon said:
You want to use the Soundflower plugin along with the Audio Midi Setup app in macOS to create preset that allows for capture of audio output.
This guide should be able to help you:

How to Record Application Audio With Soundflower (with Pictures)

In this Wikihow article you will learn how to use Soundflower in conjunction with Audacity to record audio from an application on a computer running Mac Os X. Yes, even Skype. Download Soundflower from code.google.com Once there you should...
www.wikihow.com

Make sure to change the audio from 44.1 khz to 48.
Good luck!
Click to expand...

Sound flower that’s it - not Soundbed.
 
imrazor said:
I was trying to capture some gameplay footage of Baldur's Gate 3 to try and demonstrate some of the visual glitches in this early access game. The video portion captured fine, but I got no audio. I don't see any options to capture "desktop audio", only a microphone option. Is that truly my only option? Would that capture the game audio, as well as anything I might say? Why do I not see an option to capture on-board audio?
Click to expand...
As mentioned Apple audio for video recording is only through the mic inputs ( thought to make it a bit harder to copy music in the old days ). Also in the old days we used SoundFlower to overcome this. Now there is LoopBack. LoopBack has a free 20 minute thingy, and costs $99USD for a license.

Gameplay footage and I immediately think of OBS. You can record every thing locally using OBS. Well, I think you can, using a simple setup. I use a Roland HD mixer and multiple cameras, so a bit different.

Be sure to download SoundFlower ONLY from GitHub.
 
Sharewaredemon said:
You want to use the Soundflower plugin along with the Audio Midi Setup app in macOS to create preset that allows for capture of audio output.
This guide should be able to help you:

How to Record Application Audio With Soundflower (with Pictures)

In this Wikihow article you will learn how to use Soundflower in conjunction with Audacity to record audio from an application on a computer running Mac Os X. Yes, even Skype. Download Soundflower from code.google.com Once there you should...
www.wikihow.com

Make sure to change the audio from 44.1 khz to 48.
Good luck!
Click to expand...

This. I use it to record video training calls. You need to set the audio output up correctly before whatever you want to record starts.

You probably want to compress the video file afterward as I’ve noticed Quicktime’s mp4 files are pretty big.
 
960design said:
Be sure to download SoundFlower ONLY from GitHub.
Click to expand...

*Or Homebrew, which gets it from GitHub for you

Thanks for your post though, hadn't heard of LoopBack. - But a long time ago, my friend and I recorded one of the older GTA games, Maybe 3? San Andreas? Something like that - on an underpowered MacBook Pro with Soundflower, and QuickTime, and it struggled so hard - Was GTA 3 available on OS X? Feels like that's what game we tried. We had to regularly pause the game, quit all recording and wait a bit and then start again otherwise frame rate would slowly just drop to unplayable. But we had fun, and it's part of what eventually let me to get Final Cut and make short films and such, so the memories are good, even if the product of what we did was absolute ***** :p

Addendum:
Just noticed that my initial thought of calling it SoundBed wasn't completely off - there's a "SoundflowerBed" which can route Soundlower channels to devices
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the suggestions. I got Soundflower installed and it works pretty well, though it glitched out once and I had to reboot to get audio back.

I've used OBS on other platforms, so it would be possible here too. It just always seems to require a lot of trial and error to get the 'canvas size' and 'capture resolution' selected correctly, then muck about experimenting with the various encoder settings. Then there's the conundrum of windowed vs. full screen capture; sometimes one works, sometimes the other one. More control, yes, but also a lot more work. And this is by no means a professional endeavor.
 
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I agree that fussing with OBS for something as simple as recording gameplay bugs isn't necessarily worth it.
With that said, once you get it working it will be less buggy and more reliable than QuickTime, so long term it's good to know it's there.
 
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