How to Record a Podcast With an Audio Recorder

To record a podcast with a free online audio recorder, sit in a quiet, soft-furnished room, put a decent mic close to your mouth, wear headphones, and give every speaker their own clean track. Set your levels with headroom before you press Record, then download a WAV and hand it to your editor. The recorder is free, needs no account, and runs in your browser, so your audio never leaves your device.

This guide covers the recording stage only. Editing and export have their own guide, linked at the end.

What you'll need

• A microphone. A USB mic is fine. You don't need an audio interface to make a good-sounding show.
• Headphones, ideally closed-back, for every person on the episode.
• A quiet room with soft surfaces: a carpet, curtains, a sofa, a bed.
• A current browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari) on a page served over HTTPS. Browsers only allow microphone access on secure pages, and the recorder tells you if you're on one that isn't.
• An outline. Even five talking points cut down on dead air and false starts.

Set up the room before you touch the mic

The room decides more about how a podcast sounds than the mic does. Hard, bare walls bounce your voice back into the mic a fraction of a second late, which makes speech sound distant and hollow. Soft furnishings soak that up, so a bedroom or a living room with a rug usually beats a kitchen.

Then deal with the noise you've stopped hearing. Turn off fans, move away from the fridge and the heating or air-conditioning vent, close the window, and silence every phone in the room. A steady hum is easy to miss while you talk and easy to hear on playback.

Distance, angle and breath pops have their own guide in mic placement for clean voice recordings. The short version: closer is better, and slightly off to the side beats dead-on.

Choose and test the microphone

Your computer may have several inputs: the built-in laptop mic, a webcam mic, a headset and your USB mic. The browser doesn't always pick the one you want. Before the session, open the Mic Test to confirm which device is live and that sound is arriving. How to test your microphone online walks through what the readings mean.

In the audio recorder itself, choose your real mic from the Input dropdown. Device names only show up after you grant microphone permission, so don't worry if the list looks generic at first. Make your choice before you start. The dropdown is locked while a take is running, so you can't switch mics halfway through.

If the mic doesn't show up at all, or the meter doesn't move, Microphone Not Working? How to Fix It covers permissions, privacy settings and the usual culprits.

Put headphones on everyone

Without headphones, whatever comes out of your speakers goes straight back into your mic. On a remote call that means your guest's voice lands in your track, a little delayed. You end up with an echo you can't cleanly remove, and the two voices can't be separated later.

Closed-back headphones keep the sound in your ears and out of the mic. Earbuds work too if they aren't turned up loud enough to leak. Your guests need them as well, or their speakers cause the same problem in their track.

Give every speaker one clean track

This is where podcast recording differs from a solo voiceover. There are three realistic setups:

Setup	How it works	Upside	Catch
One mic, one room	Everyone shares a single mic and one recorder	Simplest, nothing to sync	Everyone is on one track, so you can't fix one person's level or noise without affecting the others
One device per person, same room	Each speaker records on their own laptop with their own mic	Separate tracks, balanced in the edit	Each mic also picks up the other speakers, so seat people apart and keep mics close
Double-ender (remote)	Each person records locally while you talk over any call app	Full-quality local audio for everyone, no call compression	Everyone has to record, then send you their file

The recorder captures one selected input device per browser tab. So for separate tracks you need one person per device, each with their own recorder running.

Recording a remote guest with an online voice recorder

A double-ender is the standard way to record a remote interview. The call, in whatever app you already use, is only there so you can hear each other. The audio you publish comes from each person's own audio voice recorder, captured on their own machine.

The routine that makes it work:

1. Everyone joins the call with headphones on.
2. Each person opens the online voice recorder in their browser and picks their mic from the Input list.
3. Do a two-minute test before the real session. Confirm that the call and the recorder both receive your mic and that everyone's meter moves.
4. Everyone presses Record, and then one person counts down and everyone claps once, together. The clap makes a sharp spike at the start of every file, so you can line the tracks up in any editor that shows a waveform.
5. Record the episode.
6. Everyone presses Stop, downloads a WAV, and sends it to the editor however you normally share files.

Name files by episode and speaker before they go anywhere, such as ep12-host.wav and ep12-guest-sam.wav, so nobody mixes up three identical downloads.

Set levels before you hit Record

Speak at the volume you'll actually use on the show. That means the loud laugh and the excited point, not a polite "testing, testing." Watch the recorder's level meter as you do it. That bar shows that sound is arriving and roughly how hard, but it has no numbers and no clip light. For a numeric reading, use the Mic Test.

The working rule from how to set recording levels is to let your loudest moments peak around -12 to -6 dBFS, and never reach 0. If the meter slams to the top on a laugh, turn the input down at your operating system or mic and try again. Clipping is baked into the file and can't be cleanly repaired later. How to avoid clipping on an audio recorder goes through each place it can happen. A take that's a bit quiet but clean is always the safer result.

Set each speaker's level separately; a soft-spoken guest and a loud host shouldn't share a gain setting.

How to record the episode in the audio recorder

Here is the actual flow in the voice and audio recorder:

1. Click Enable microphone. Your browser asks for permission. Allow it. Nothing touches the mic until you click this.
2. Choose your mic from the Input dropdown. The list now shows real device names.
3. Test-speak and watch the meter. Say a few lines at show volume and check that the bar moves well without pinning at the top.
4. Click Record. The elapsed timer starts counting.
5. Record about 10 seconds of room tone first. Everyone stays silent. That captures the room's background sound on its own, which helps when patching gaps in the edit and shows what noise cleanup has to deal with.
6. Use Pause and Resume between segments. Pause for a break or a reset, then Resume into the same take. You'll have one continuous file instead of a pile of fragments.
7. Click Stop. The take appears with a preview player. Listen to a few spots before you do anything else.
8. Download the WAV for editing. You'll see three options: the native file (labelled "as recorded": .webm in current browsers, .m4a on older Safari versions), WAV, and MP3 · 192 kbps.

Why WAV? The native file is already compressed. The WAV is decoded straight from that take, so it doesn't add quality that wasn't captured. What it does give you is a lossless copy that every editor opens, and it won't lose another round of quality each time you cut and re-save. Keep the MP3 for sending a quick listen-back to a co-host.

Download before you close the tab. The take lives only in that browser tab until you save it. Close the tab or navigate away first and the recording is gone.

Don't record "to" a loudness target

Podcasts are commonly delivered at -16 LUFS, but that number applies to the finished episode, not to the raw recording. You reach it at the end, after editing, with a normalizer. How to master a podcast covers that step, and what LUFS means explains the unit.

While recording, your only job is a clean signal with headroom. A raw take that sounds quieter than published shows is normal.

Troubleshooting

I can hear my guest in my track, or there's an echo. Someone isn't wearing headphones, or their headphones are loud enough to leak. Put closed-back headphones on everyone, turn them down a little, and re-test before you record again.

My level keeps jumping around. Usually it's distance: you lean in to make a point and sit back to listen. Keep a steady distance, and set the level on your loudest moment.

The mic disconnected in the middle of a take. The recorder keeps everything captured up to that point and shows it below with a message. Download that part, reconnect the mic, enable it again and record the rest as a second take.

I got a .m4a, not a .webm. That's expected on older versions of Safari, which record MP4 (AAC), saved as .m4a. Current browsers record WebM (Opus), and the recorder tells you which format it's using before you start. The WAV download works the same either way.

Related: what happens after you stop recording

Once every track is downloaded, the next stage is cleanup and editing. How to record and edit a podcast online free takes your files through noise reduction, cutting, joining, leveling and export. Usually the first stop is the noise reducer, in Voice mode, for each track. For the general picture of any recording project, see From Raw Recording to Finished Edit, and browse more guides in the how-to hub.

Frequently asked questions

Can I record a podcast for free in my browser? Yes. Vocal Cut's Audio Recorder runs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari with no account and no install. You enable your microphone, choose an input, record with pause and resume, and download the take as the native file, a WAV or a 192 kbps MP3. Processing happens locally in the browser, so your audio never leaves your device. The page needs a secure HTTPS connection for microphone access.

Do I need a USB microphone to record a podcast? No, but it helps. A USB mic placed close to your mouth usually sounds much better than a laptop's built-in mic, which sits far away and picks up the room and the keyboard. You don't need an audio interface. The room and the mic distance matter as much as the mic itself, so a modest USB mic in a soft-furnished room is a solid starting point.

How do I record a remote podcast guest? Record a double-ender. You and your guest talk over any call app with headphones on, and each of you records your own mic locally in a browser audio recorder at the same time. Everyone claps once at the start to create an alignment spike. Afterwards each person downloads a WAV and sends it to the editor, who lines the tracks up and edits them together.

What format should I record a podcast in? Record in the browser's native format, then download the WAV for editing. The native take is WebM (Opus) in current browsers, or M4A (AAC) on older Safari versions. The WAV is decoded from that take, so it adds no quality, but it is a lossless copy every editor opens, and it avoids losing quality each time you re-save. Export your final episode as MP3 after editing.

Does the audio recorder upload my recording? No. The recording is captured and stored in your browser tab, and your audio never leaves your device. That also means the take exists only in that tab until you download it, so save your file before closing the page or navigating away. If you're recording a double-ender, each person sends their own downloaded file to the editor themselves.