Guide

How to record a Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet call on a Mac

Record any meeting on your Mac — with the other person's audio — for free, locally, and without a bot joining the call. It works no matter which plan or role you have, because you're recording your Mac's own audio, not the platform's gated recorder.

Last updated: 28 June 2026 · By Mumr

Why this is harder than it should be

There are only a few ways for a Mac app to capture the other side of a call, and most have catches:

• The platform's own recorder. Zoom cloud recording is paid (free plans get local recording, host-only by default); Microsoft Teams recording is cloud-only and needs a qualifying license — external guests can't record; Google Meet recording needs Business Standard or higher, so free and personal accounts can't record at all. Every one of them notifies all participants automatically.
• QuickTime / screen recording. These can record your microphone but not system audio — macOS blocks one app from listening to another's output. The old workaround is a virtual audio driver like BlackHole, which is fiddly and easy to leave misconfigured (a silent recording).
• Bot notetakers. Otter, Fireflies and similar tools send a bot that joins the call as a visible participant and records into their cloud — increasingly a consent and IT-policy problem (there is active 2025 litigation over recording without all-party consent and training on call audio).
• Native macOS capture. Since macOS 13, Apple provides first-party APIs (ScreenCaptureKit, and a Core Audio process tap on macOS 14.4+) that capture system audio with a one-time permission prompt — no driver, no bot. This is what Mumr uses.

How to record a meeting on a Mac with Mumr

The steps are the same for Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, because Mumr records your Mac's audio rather than the meeting app. The first time you record, macOS shows a one-time system-audio permission prompt — grant it once.

1. Open Mumr before or at the start of your call.
2. Grant permissions on first run — approve the microphone and system-audio recording prompts from macOS.
3. Join your meeting normally in the Zoom app, Teams, or Google Meet in your browser. Nothing special inside the meeting app.
4. Tell people you're recording — etiquette, and in many places the law.
5. Press Record in Mumr. It captures your mic + the call's system audio together, locally. No bot joins.
6. Stop and summarise. Mumr produces the local audio file and an on-device transcript, then summarises with the AI you choose — Apple Intelligence, your own Anthropic/OpenAI key, or a local CLI.

Platform notes

• Zoom: You don't need Zoom's own recording enabled, a paid plan, or host permission — Mumr records the audio Zoom plays on your Mac.
• Microsoft Teams: No Teams recording license required, and it works even as an external guest — you're recording your machine, not invoking Teams' cloud recorder.
• Google Meet: Works on free/personal Google accounts and Business Starter, which can't use Meet's built-in recording at all.

No bot joins the call

Because Mumr captures audio directly off your Mac, nothing appears in the participant list or waiting room — there's no uninvited "Notetaker" attendee for others to see or question. Capture and transcription stay 100% on your Mac, and summaries run through the AI you choose, so meeting content isn't fed into a vendor's training pipeline.

One honest caveat: "no bot" changes the optics and the data path, not your duty to disclose. You should still tell people you're recording. Mumr's advantage is that it doesn't parade an uninvited recorder into the room and doesn't ship anyone's audio to a third party — not that it lets you record secretly.

Manual fallback (no app)

If you ever need to do this by hand: install BlackHole (free virtual audio driver), create a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup combining BlackHole + your speakers, set the Mac's output to it, then record BlackHole as the input in QuickTime. Remember to switch your output back afterward. This captures system audio only — mixing in your mic at the same time needs an Aggregate Device, which is exactly the fiddly setup a native app removes.