I’ve been able to do an amazing amount of recording recently just singing, speaking and playing instruments into my mac laptop with the use of a great little program called Audio Recorder.
I was writing up a little tutorial for a friend of mine about how to use it on my laptop, and it’s about the fourth time I’ve written one up, so I thought I’d upload it here.
Note that I actually use .wav files when I do takes to import into protools, since it’s higher quality. These directions are for one of Wide Hive’s artists, so he can make a radio plug, so I’ve told him to select “MP3” as the format. There are a number of formats you can select in Audio Recorder’s “preferences” folder.
You can just speak into your laptop – there’s a built in microphone already there. Just speak into your left speaker – that’s where it is. (I didn’t even know it was there until sometime last year. Guess t’s always been there.)
1. Download the “Audio Recorder” program here:

It’s free, and should be easy to install. Just download it and double click on it to be taken through the install.
2. Once it’s installed. Double click on it to launch, and it will open up a window with a record, pause, and stop button.
3. Create a folder where you want to save your files. Next, go to “preferences” under the “Audio Recorder” menu, and select the folder you just created as the output folder.
4. Next, select “mp3” as your output format.
5. The rest is easy – Just hit record to start recording.
You can see the levels move in red along with your voice to see it’s working.
You can hit the pause button in between takes, and then when you’re done, hit “stop” and it will ask you to name the file before it saves it for you in the folder you’ve created.