Sound recorder
For recording sound rather than speech: room tone, instruments, birdsong, machinery, an idea hummed into a laptop. Browser noise processing is switched off and the default output is uncompressed.
Ready. Press Record and allow microphone access when your browser asks.
Why this page is set up differently
Browsers apply three processes to microphone input by default: echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control. All three exist to make video calls sound better, and all three are actively harmful when the sound itself is the subject.
Noise suppression is tuned to identify anything that is not a human voice and remove it — which is precisely the material you are trying to capture. Automatic gain control continuously adjusts the level, so a quiet passage gets pushed up and a loud one pulled down, flattening the dynamics that make a recording sound real. Echo cancellation removes the room, and the room is often the point.
This page requests the raw signal with all three disabled. Combined with uncompressed WAV output, that gives you the closest thing a browser can produce to what actually reached the microphone.
Getting a good capture
- Set the level before you commit. Watch the meter through a full cycle of whatever you are recording, and set gain so the loudest moment touches amber rather than red. Clipping is unrecoverable.
- Record thirty seconds of room tone. Silence in a space is never actually silent, and having a clean sample of it makes later editing dramatically easier.
- Get closer than feels necessary. Doubling the distance to a source loses roughly six decibels, and quiet sources recorded from across a room are mostly room.
- Use an external microphone if you can. Laptop microphones are optimised for a voice about half a metre away and are poor at everything else.
- Leave handles. Start recording a few seconds early and stop a few seconds late — you can always trim, but you cannot add.
Format for sound work
WAV, and it is not close. Lossy encoders are psychoacoustic models built around speech and music; they behave unpredictably on unusual material, and the artefacts show up most audibly in exactly the content sound recordists care about — reverb tails, transients, high-frequency detail. Record uncompressed and convert at the end if you need to.
- WAV recorderThe same uncompressed output, general purpose.
- Volume meterA larger meter for setting levels.
- Recording singingVocal capture with the same raw settings.
- Reduce background noiseFixing it at the source rather than in software.
Questions
Why does this page sound noisier than the other recorders?
Because it disables the browser's noise suppression on purpose. That processing is designed to strip out everything that is not a voice, which would destroy the sound you are trying to capture. What you hear is the actual signal from your microphone.
Can I record an instrument?
Yes, though the microphone matters more than the software. A built-in laptop microphone will capture an acoustic guitar recognisably but not well. A USB microphone or an audio interface will make far more difference than any setting on this page.
Is this good enough for field recording?
For sketches, references and casual capture, yes. For work where the recording is the deliverable, a dedicated recorder gives you 24-bit depth, better preamps and no dependency on a browser tab staying open. This is a capable stand-in, not a replacement.
Why is automatic gain control disabled?
Because it changes the recording level continuously, which flattens dynamics and makes quiet passages noisy. For a call that is desirable; for a recording it destroys the difference between loud and quiet that carries most of the character.
Can I record in stereo?
Output is mono. True stereo capture needs two matched microphones and an interface, which is outside what a browser recorder handles well.
What sample rate does it record at?
Whatever your audio hardware runs at, typically 44,100 or 48,000 Hz. The page does not resample, so you get the device's native rate.