My history and experience with audio dates back to the days of Ampex reel-to-reel recorders, and using a razor blade to edit tape on an aluminum editing block. Thankfully, those days are gone, but my love for audio tools lives on, including a simple app that does basically one thing very well.
It’s called Piezo, and all it does is record the audio stream from almost any Mac app.
All you need to do is install Piezo, select the app whose audio you want to record, and press the big red Record button. It’s that easy. If you’re streaming audio from a DVD, a music website, a movie, Spotify, Skype, or mostly whatever, Piezo captures the audio and saves it to your Mac as an audio file.
Piezo comes with basic audio recording presets so you won’t have to fumble around to figure out how to record what. Plug in a microphone and Piezo acts as an audio recorder. Need to record the audio from a Skype call? Piezo can do.
Piezo records audio from QuickTime Player, VLC Player, and pretty much any Mac app that can play audio, including Safari, Chrome, or Firefox.
Each audio recording can be saved. Just add a title, select the audio quality from a drop down menu, and Piezo does the rest when you press the red Record button. The audio file can be played back in almost any Mac audio app, mixed in Garageband, sweetened in Amadeus Pro, or shared with a friend online.
If you want it to do more, say, for example, edit the audio file, you’ll need a different app (for Mac users on a budget, try the free Ocenaudio app). But no other app I know makes it easier to capture audio from another Mac app than Piezo.