New Feature: Screen Recording With System Sounds In Chrome

Remus -

When we 1st introduced standards compliant screen capture in the Pipe recorder, capturing system sounds was not supported by Chrome or Firefox.

However, since the release of Chrome 74 back in April, capturing the system sounds became possible. As a result, we've now updated the Pipe HTML5 desktop recorder to support capturing system sounds together with the video of the screen and the input from the microphone.

The feature is only available when embedding a recorder using the Pipe embed code v2.0. If you're still using the (rather old) 1.0 code, you'll find the new 2.0 code in your Pipe account area in the Embed section. The 2.0 embed code will soon become the default one.

You don't need to make any changes to existing embed codes in order to benefit from the new feature, all Pipe recorders embedded with the 2.0 code now support it.

How It Works

Whenever a user chooses to record their screen, a new option to share the audio will show up in the Chrome screen sharing dialog box:

Screen sharing user interface in Chrome with "Share audio" checkbox

When a user chooses to share the audio - by toggling the option ON - the system sounds will get captured together with their microphone audio (if present) in one merged audio track.

You can record the sound from YouTube videos, video calls held in the browser and even Netflix movies.

Recording a Chrome Tab that's running YouTube with the Pipe recorder. The sound from the YouTube video is captured.

The new option shows up in the the following scenarios:

  • On Windows, when recording Your Entire Screen (all system sounds will be captured)
  • On Windows, when recording a Chrome Tab (only the sounds in that particular tab will be captured)
  • On macOS and Linux, when recording a Chrome Tab (only the sounds in that particular tab will be captured)

If one chooses not to share their audio, the recorder will work as it did until now: the screen will be recorded together with (just) the audio from the user's microphone.

Known Limitations

  • At the time of writing, on Chrome for macOS and Linux it is only possible to share your audio when choosing to capture a Chrome tab. You can not share the system sounds when recording the entire screen.
  • Firefox does not yet support capturing system sounds. This ticket tracks the implementation.