Voice Recorder

About this voice recorder

Press one button and your microphone is recording. Press another and you have a file.

No app to install, no account, no permission to give anything but the microphone itself. It is the sound-recorder that used to come with a computer, except it is already open in the tab in front of you.

The recording never leaves your device. It is held in the page and handed to you as a download. Nothing is uploaded, so nobody — including us — can hear it.

What it does

• Records your microphone at whatever quality your microphone can manage
• Pause and resume — stop for a moment without ending the recording
• A live level bar, so you can see the microphone is actually hearing you before you talk for ten minutes
• Choose the microphone when you have more than one — a headset, a desk mic, the built-in one
• Noise and echo clean-up, on by default, which is the difference between a usable voice note and a room
• Play it back before you decide to keep it
• Download it as the original small file, or as a WAV that opens in anything

Pick the right microphone first

If you have a headset plugged in, a webcam, and a microphone in the laptop lid, the browser will pick one for you — and it is often the wrong one.

The dropdown at the top lists every microphone the browser can see. After you record once, the names fill in properly (a browser hides device names until you have given permission at least once).

Then watch the level bar while you say a few words. If it barely moves, the wrong device is selected or the microphone is muted. Better to find that out now.

The clean-up switch

Clean up the sound turns on the browser's echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain. Leave it on for anything spoken: it removes the hum of a fan, the room echo and the difference between leaning in and sitting back.

Turn it off when you are recording music, or an instrument, or anything where the processing would flatten what you are trying to capture.

Two ways to save it

Original is what your browser recorded natively — WebM on Chrome and Firefox, MP4 on Safari. It is compressed, so the file is small. It plays in browsers, in VLC and in most modern apps.

WAV is uncompressed. The file is much bigger, but it opens in absolutely everything, including old software, editing programs and transcription tools that refuse anything else. Choose WAV when the file has to go somewhere fussy.

For an MP3, download the recording and run it through the Audio Converter — that is the one step this tool leaves to its neighbour, because an MP3 encoder is a 30 MB download that most people recording a voice note do not need.

What people record

• Voice notes and reminders to yourself
• A meeting or a call you are part of, for notes afterwards
• Interviews for an article, a dissertation or a podcast
• Practising a talk to hear how it actually sounds
• Pronunciation when learning a language, to compare against a native speaker
• A voiceover for a video or a slide deck
• Song ideas and rehearsals before they are forgotten
• A quick audio message to send to someone

Good to know

• The recording lives in this page only. Closing or reloading the tab loses it — download it first
• The tab will warn you if you try to close it while still recording
• Keep the tab open while recording; some browsers stop a recording in a hidden tab
• The first time, the browser asks for microphone permission. If you refuse by accident, click the icon in the address bar to allow it, then press Start again
• It works on a phone too — but a phone call coming in will interrupt it
• Recording other people has rules that differ by country. Ask first; in many places you must
• To cut the silence off the start and end, use Audio Trim
• To turn what you said into written text, use Speech to Text or Audio to Text

How to use it

• Choose your microphone from the dropdown (leave it on Default if you only have one)
• Leave Clean up the sound on for speech; turn it off for music
• Press Start recording and allow the microphone when the browser asks
• Watch the level bar move as you speak — press Pause any time, then Resume
• Press Stop when you are done, and play it back
• Pick Original or WAV, then click Download recording

Related tools

• Audio Converter — turn the recording into an MP3
• Audio Trim — cut the start, the end or a section
• Speech to Text — write down what you say, as you say it
• Audio to Text — transcribe a recording you already have
• Remove Background Noise — clean up a noisy recording afterwards
• Mic Test — check a microphone works before recording
• Screen Recorder — record the screen and the microphone together
• Text to Speech — the other direction: words into a voice