How do I record music playing on my Mac?

Not with the built-in apps: QuickTime Player and Voice Memos capture microphone input only, so pointing them at your speakers gives you a muffled room recording. Use an app that captures system audio directly, such as Soundshine Record, or install a virtual audio driver like BlackHole and record from it.

Is it legal to record music from a streaming service?

Recording copyrighted music from a streaming service almost always breaches that service's terms of use, and redistributing it infringes copyright. Recording your own music, public domain works, Creative Commons material, or a live stream you have permission to capture is a different matter. The technique is neutral, the use is not.

Does recording music from my Mac lose quality?

No, as long as you capture digitally. A process tap or virtual audio driver copies the stream before it reaches your speakers, so there is no analog conversion. Recording through a cable from headphone out to an input does lose quality and adds noise.

How do I record music without capturing notifications?

Use per-app capture and select just the music app, so nothing else reaches the file. Soundshine Record, Piezo, Audio Hijack, and OBS can all target a single app. Virtual audio drivers such as BlackHole cannot, because they only ever see the final mixed output.

How to Record Music Playing on Your Mac

You want a clean file of something playing on your Mac: a track you made, a live set, a mix, a piece of production music. Pointing a microphone at your speakers is not it, and neither is a cable from the headphone jack.

Both of those convert perfectly good digital audio into analog and back, adding noise and losing detail for no reason. Capture the digital stream instead.

A Note on What You Are Recording

Worth stating plainly. Recording copyrighted music from a streaming service breaches essentially every streaming service’s terms of use, and redistributing it infringes copyright regardless of how you obtained it.

Recording your own work, public domain recordings, Creative Commons licensed material, a livestream you have permission to capture, or a mix you made yourself is a completely ordinary thing to want to do. That is who this is written for.

Why the Built-In Apps Cannot Help

QuickTime Player and Voice Memos record microphone inputs. macOS does not present system audio as an input device, so neither app can see the music at all.

If you try anyway, you record your speakers through the built-in mic, complete with the room, your keyboard, and whatever is happening outside. It sounds exactly as bad as it sounds.

Capturing It Digitally

Open Soundshine Record and approve the recording permission once.
Select the music app by name in the source list: Music, Spotify, your browser, or your DAW. Choosing the app rather than all system audio keeps notification sounds out of the file.
Set the format to WAV or AIFF if the audio is going into an editor or a DAW, or AAC (.m4a) if you are just going to listen to it.
Press record, then start playback.
Stop. The file is in ~/Music/SoundshineRecord, at 48 kHz stereo.

Play at full volume within the app, since the capture follows the app’s own output level. Your system volume is irrelevant to the recording, so you can turn your speakers down without affecting the file.

Requires macOS 15 or later. $14.99 one time, with a fully functional trial.

The Free Route

BlackHole is a free, open-source virtual audio driver.

Install it from existential.audio.
Open Audio MIDI Setup, click +, choose Create Multi-Output Device.
Tick BlackHole 2ch and your real output so you can still hear the music.
Set that Multi-Output Device as your output in System Settings > Sound.
Record from BlackHole 2ch in QuickTime Player, Audacity, or your DAW.

Free and reliable. Two caveats: it captures everything mixed together, so a notification mid-track is in the file permanently, and your system output stays on the Multi-Output Device until you change it back.

Getting the Quality Right

Never record through a cable. Headphone out to line in converts digital to analog and back, adding hiss and losing dynamic range. If your Mac even has a line input, which most no longer do.

Match 48 kHz. macOS runs at 48 kHz. Recording at 44.1 forces a resample that gains you nothing.

Uncompressed if you are editing. WAV or AIFF for anything heading into a DAW or an editor. Every compress-and-reopen cycle stacks artifacts, so compress once at the very end.

Do not expect to beat the source. A 128 kbps stream recorded to a 24-bit WAV is still a 128 kbps stream in a much larger file. Recording preserves quality, it does not add any.

Leave headroom. If the app is outputting at maximum and hitting 0 dB, back it off slightly. Clipping is not recoverable.

How to record audio on a Mac, the full overview
How to record internal audio on a Mac, every method compared
How to record YouTube audio on a Mac, for browser audio specifically
Recording computer audio with Audacity, if Audacity is your editor