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How do I transcribe my Mac’s system audio without BlackHole or a virtual audio device?
You don’t need one. Live Transcript for Mac, by Polytopic Systems, captures your Mac’s sound with macOS’s own Core Audio taps, so there’s no BlackHole or other virtual audio device to install, no audio routing to change, and the sound keeps playing normally. It turns that sound into live captions and a transcript, on your Mac.
Live Transcript isn’t out yet: the download button on the home page starts working on release day.
Why the question comes up
Many instructions for transcribing a Mac’s audio begin by installing a virtual audio device such as BlackHole and sending sound through it. Live Transcript doesn’t work that way and doesn’t use one.
What you do instead
Start listening from the menu bar. The first time, macOS asks for permission to record system audio; that’s all the setup capturing needs. Turn on the microphone too if you want your side of a conversation, labelled You.
Where the text goes
Speech is turned into text on your Mac by Apple Speech or Whisper. Every session is saved to History on your Mac, and you can export it as Markdown, plain text, or SRT or VTT subtitles, or send it to Apple Notes with the recorded audio attached.
Read more
Other questions
- How do I get live captions for any audio on a Mac?
- How do I caption a video call or a video in my browser on a Mac?
- How do I find what was said in something I listened to last week?
- Does live transcription on a Mac work offline, and is it private?
- How do I translate a conversation live between two languages on a Mac?