About this site

The problem this was built for

Most free online recorders upload your audio to a server. That is a reasonable design if the goal is a shareable link, and for a lot of recordings it is completely fine.

But a great many recordings are ones people would rather not hand to a third party — a journalist's interview with a source, dictated case notes, an HR conversation, a first attempt at speaking a new language. For those, "we promise to delete it" is a weaker guarantee than "it never arrived".

The constraint

Everything happens in the browser: capture, encoding, download. Not as a policy that could change, but as an architecture with no upload path in it. You can verify that in your Network tab in about thirty seconds, and we would rather you did than took our word for it.

What that costs

Being upfront, because a tool that only lists advantages is not describing itself accurately:

• No shareable links. Those need hosted audio. If you want one, Vocaroo does it well.
• No recovery. Close the tab before downloading and the recording is gone.
• Limited editing. Take-based only. Audacity is free and vastly more capable.
• No background recording. The tab must stay visible, which a native app avoids.
• Memory-bound length. Very long recordings can exhaust a phone's RAM.

Where another tool is the better answer, the comparison pages say so.

How it is funded

The recorder is free and has no account, no paid tier and no advertising inside the tool. Costs are low because there is no audio processing or storage to pay for — that is one practical benefit of the architecture.

If funding ever changes in a way that affects how the site works, it will be stated here and on the privacy page rather than quietly.

What is not planned

• Accounts, sign-ups or email capture.
• Cloud storage or sync.
• Uploading audio for any purpose, including processing.
• Advertising in the recorder.
• Watermarks or audio stamps on output.

Corrections welcome

Technical documentation drifts out of date as browsers change, and the comparison pages describe products that get updated. If you hit an accessibility barrier, the accessibility statement explains what has been tested and what has not. If something here is wrong or has become wrong, please get in touch — corrections are more useful than compliments.

• How it worksThe technical detail, written to be checked.
• PrivacyWhat is and is not collected.
• Best free recordersIncluding when to use something else.
• ContactCorrections and questions.

Questions