What is system audio?
Also called: internal audio, desktop audio, loopback audio, computer sound
Definition
System audio is the sound the computer itself is playing, as opposed to sound picked up by a microphone.
Recording system audio captures a video’s soundtrack, a call, or an app’s sounds directly, with no speakers or microphone in between. On Windows this is done by "loopback": tapping the signal on its way to the output device.
Only sound sent to the device being tapped is recorded, which is usually the default output. If a recording has no system sound, the audio was probably playing through a different device.
In Sceed
Sceed records system audio and the microphone as separate lanes, so each can be levelled or muted after the take.
How to record your screen with audio →
Related terms
- Audio track
- An audio track is one stream of sound in a recording, such as the microphone or the computer’s sound, that can be adjusted separately from the others.
- Noise gate
- A noise gate silences an audio signal whenever it falls below a set volume, removing background noise between words.
- Normalization
- Normalization adjusts the volume of a recording to a consistent target level.