Wiretap

Record everything you hear. Keep everything local.

A macOS menu bar app that captures your system audio and microphone into a single .m4a file. Zero dependencies, zero cloud, zero accounts.

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Hit record before a Zoom call, a YouTube rabbit hole, or a three-hour podcast. Wiretap captures both sides of the conversation, mixes them together, and drops the file in a searchable library on your Mac.

Download

Wiretap requires macOS 15 or later. Open the DMG, drag Wiretap into Applications, then grant Microphone and Screen & System Audio Recording access when prompted. macOS may require Wiretap to be relaunched after the system-audio permission is first granted.

The public DMG is signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple. See the v0.1.0 release notes or download its SHA-256 checksum.

How it works

Wiretap grabs system audio through ScreenCaptureKit (no virtual audio driver to install) and records the physical default microphone at the same time. When you're on speakers, it keeps the live capture pinned to that physical device and applies voice isolation during finalization, so VoiceChat apps cannot silently replace or stop the microphone graph. On headphones or Bluetooth, it skips the processing and captures raw. During the final mix, microphone audio receives a dedicated gain boost while system audio stays at its captured level, with peak limiting to prevent clipping.

Default input and output changes are handled while recording. Output switches leave capture running, and microphone switches rebind the live writer to the new default device while preserving the recording timeline.

You can start and stop from the menu bar or hit Cmd+Shift+R from anywhere. After you stop, the library shows a saving state while it creates the final file. Recordings go into a built-in library where you can play them back at 1×, 1.1×, 1.24×, 1.5×, or 2× speed, search, rename, export, or share. If your Mac sleeps mid-recording or the app gets killed, the next launch recovers what it can.

The whole project is pure Swift with zero external dependencies. Builds from source with one command.

Build from source

swift run Wiretap          # run from source
Scripts/build-app.sh debug # or build a proper .app

Requires macOS 15+ and will ask for Microphone and Screen Recording permissions on first run.

Build a DMG

Scripts/package-dmg.sh debug

See the release docs for signing, notarization, and CI details.

Tests

swift test

License

MIT. See LICENSE.