You want to record what Chrome is playing. Or capture Zoom audio alongside your microphone. Or stream a YouTube tutorial into a transcription tool. On a Mac, this has been unreasonably hard for decades.

The traditional answer was virtual audio drivers - Soundflower, BlackHole, Loopback. They intercept audio at the system level by installing kernel extensions or audio plugins. They work, but they're fragile. macOS updates break them regularly. They sometimes require restarts. Soundflower was abandoned years ago. BlackHole requires manual routing. Loopback costs $99 and still installs system-level components that Apple keeps restricting further with each release.

macOS 14.2 quietly solved this with Core Audio Taps - a native API that lets apps capture audio from any process without drivers, plugins, or kernel extensions.

What are Core Audio Taps?

Core Audio Taps are an Apple API introduced in macOS 14.2 (Sonoma). They let an app request the audio output of any other running process directly from the system's audio server. No virtual devices. No routing tricks. No kernel extensions.

The key difference: it's scoped. You ask for a specific app's audio and you get exactly that process's output. You can capture Chrome without hearing Spotify. You can capture Zoom without hearing your notification sounds. Or you can request system-wide audio to capture everything.

This is fundamentally different from virtual drivers, which create a fake audio device that sits between apps and your speakers and intercepts everything. Core Audio Taps read the audio stream directly from the process you specify. It's cleaner, more reliable, and nothing about your system changes - no new devices appear in Audio MIDI Setup, no routing to reconfigure.

What is AudioPiper?

AudioPiper is a free macOS menu bar app that puts a simple interface on top of Core Audio Taps. Open it, and you see every audio source available: your microphone, system audio, and every app currently producing sound. Toggle on what you want to capture. That's it.

AudioPiper mixes your selected sources in real time with per-source volume control. You can record the mix to a WAV file, or stream it live to AI tools for transcription, translation, or analysis.

There is nothing to install beyond the app itself. No drivers, no configuration, no restart.

How do you use AudioPiper?

Download AudioPiper from the Mac App Store (free). It lives in your menu bar.

To capture a specific app's audio: Click the menu bar icon. You'll see a list of every running app that's producing audio. Toggle one on. You're now capturing that app's audio output.

To record multiple sources: Toggle on your microphone plus one or more app sources. Adjust the per-source volume sliders to balance them - for example, turn up the Zoom audio and turn down your mic if you're mostly interested in what the other person is saying. Hit record to save a WAV file.

To feed audio into AI: AudioPiper can stream the audio mix to ToolPiper (our local AI engine). From there, you can run it through voice transcription, voice chat, or live translation - all on your Mac, no audio uploaded anywhere.

What people actually use this for

Recording a Zoom call with both sides. You're on a client call and want a record of what was discussed. Toggle on Zoom and your microphone. AudioPiper captures both sides of the conversation in one recording, with separate volume controls so you can balance them. The recording stays on your Mac - no cloud transcription service sees it.

Transcribing a webinar or YouTube video. A two-hour training session is playing in Chrome. You don't want to take notes manually. Toggle on Chrome in AudioPiper, and the audio streams directly into a local transcription pipeline. You get a full text transcript without the audio ever leaving your machine, and without paying per-minute for a cloud API.

Recording a podcast with reference material. You're recording yourself talking while a reference clip plays in another app. Toggle on your mic plus the reference app. AudioPiper mixes them. No mixing board, no virtual audio routing - just two toggles.

Getting subtitles for anything. Any audio playing on your Mac can be captured and fed into real-time transcription. A foreign-language video, an accessibility need, a lecture you want to follow in text - capture the app's audio and transcribe it locally.

What AudioPiper doesn't do

It's worth being clear about the edges.

AudioPiper captures what apps send to the audio system. If an app uses DRM-protected audio streams (like some streaming services in certain browsers), the audio may not be available to capture. This is an Apple-level restriction, not an AudioPiper limitation.

An app needs to be actively producing audio for it to appear in the source list. You can't pre-select an app before it starts playing - toggle it on once you hear it.

AudioPiper records to WAV. If you need MP3, AAC, or other compressed formats, you'll need to convert after recording. WAV is lossless and uncompressed, which is ideal for AI processing and archival, but the files are large (~10 MB per minute of stereo audio).

AudioPiper captures audio only. If you need screen recording with audio, see VisionPiper for the video side.

A note on permissions

Core Audio Taps use the Audio Capture permission - not the Screen Recording permission. There's no purple recording indicator in the menu bar. macOS will prompt you once the first time you use it.

This matters because the Screen Recording permission prompt is invasive (it appears for every app that wants to see your screen), and the purple dot is distracting during presentations and screenshares. Audio Capture is a lighter, less disruptive permission.

Get AudioPiper

AudioPiper is free on the Mac App Store. Requires macOS 14.2 or later and Apple Silicon (M1+).

For AI workflows (transcription, translation, voice chat), you'll also want ToolPiper - our local AI engine that runs speech-to-text, language models, and text-to-speech on your Mac. AudioPiper captures the audio; ToolPiper processes it.

This is part of a series on local-first AI workflows on macOS. See also: Voice Transcription, Voice Chat, Transcribe & Summarize.