Turn off system sound effects while recording on Mac

You record a clean screen demo, play it back, and there it is — the Trash crumple over your voiceover, a shutter click every time you screenshot on camera, little UI blips punctuating the narration. When your capture includes system audio, macOS's interface sounds ride along. Switch them off before you hit record and the track stays clean.

Turn interface effects off before you record

1. Open System Settings → Sound.
2. Go to the Sound Effects section.
3. Untick Play user interface sound effects.

Now the system clicks, the empty-Trash crumple, the send-mail whoosh, and the screenshot shutter won't play — so they can't be captured into your recording's system-audio track. Do this once and it holds for every session until you turn it back on. It works the same on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

Why these sounds sneak into your recording

A screen recording only picks up interface sounds when you're capturing system audio — for example a QuickTime or Shift-Cmd-5 recording routed through an audio device that includes the Mac's output, or a third-party recorder set to grab internal audio. Because those effects come out of the same output as the app audio you do want, the recorder can't tell them apart. It grabs everything.

Muting the interface effects at the source is cleaner than fixing it later. There's no editing out a crumple that landed on top of a sentence, no ducking a shutter buried in the waveform. Silence them before recording and the only system audio that reaches the track is the audio you intend.

Set it from the Terminal

If you run recordings from a script or a Shortcut, flip the setting in one line as part of your pre-record routine:

# Silence interface effects before recording
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled -bool false
killall screencaptureui

# Undo — restore effects when you're done
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled -bool true
killall screencaptureui

The killall screencaptureui line restarts the screen-capture service so it picks up the change straight away — worth running right before you record so the shutter and recording UI honour the new setting immediately.

Run a five-second test take first

The cheapest insurance against a ruined recording is a throwaway one. Before the real session, record five seconds while you deliberately click around — empty the Trash, take a screenshot, drag a file — then play it back and listen. If those actions are silent on the track, your setting is working and you can record with confidence.

A couple of other sources are worth checking in the same pass. Apps you leave open can chime mid-take too — a chat notification tone, a mail alert — so quit or silence the noisy ones before you start. And if you only need your voice and the picture, not the Mac's audio at all, choosing a microphone-only input in your recorder sidesteps interface sounds completely, since nothing from the system output is being captured in the first place. Either way, the interface-effects switch is the setting that keeps a system-audio capture clean.

Building the test into your routine pays off most on longer recordings, where a single stray sound thirty minutes in can mean re-shooting the whole thing. Thirty seconds of checking up front is always cheaper than an hour of editing — or re-recording — after the fact, and it turns "I hope that was clean" into "I know it was."

Hide the pop-ups too

Clean audio is only half a clean recording — a notification banner sliding in mid-demo is the visual equivalent. See how to hide notifications while screen recording on Mac to keep the picture as tidy as the sound.