What this is for
Voice memos for a podcast intake, dictation you'll feed into a transcript, a quick audio note for a teammate, scratch tracks while you sketch out an idea — anything where you need to capture your voice without setting up a DAW. Open the page, hit the mic, talk, stop, download. That's the whole product.
The level meter is doing real work
We tap the live mic stream into a Web Audio AnalyserNode and compute RMS each animation frame. The bar going red means you're clipping — back off the mic or lower system input gain. The bar staying flat means the OS is feeding us the wrong device or the mic is muted at the hardware level. It's the kind of feedback most browser recorders skip, and it's the difference between a usable take and a wasted one.
Opus by default, MP3 on demand
Native browser recording goes to audio/webm;codecs=opus, which is the right call: Opus sounds excellent at low bitrates and is what most modern tools accept. But MP3 is still what podcast hosts, transcript services, and old-school email attachments expect. Our MP3 export runs FFmpeg in your browser via WebAssembly with libmp3lame -q:a 2 (VBR, ~190 kbps) and gives you the file with no quality drop you can hear. Same vibe as our MP4 → MP3 extractor — different input, same engine.
When you should use a real DAW instead
If you're recording a podcast for distribution, multitracking guests, applying compression, or layering in music, you want Audacity, GarageBand, Riverside, or Descript. This tool is intentionally a single-track scratchpad. For screen + voice recording with a sharable link at the end, that's exactly what Clipy does — same no-signup, no-watermark policy, plus a viewer page anyone can open.