Record a Google Meet call on your Mac
Works on the free plan, in the browser, as a participant.
The record button you may not have
Meet's own recording is a Workspace feature: the right paid edition, the right role in the meeting, an admin who has left it enabled. On a personal Google account there is no record button at all — not hidden, not greyed out, simply absent. And when recording does run, it captures what Google decides to keep and saves it to the organiser's Drive, not yours.
None of that gating exists on your side of the call. The audio is already on your Mac — your voice in the microphone, everyone else in the sound Meet is playing. Recording it there needs no plan and no role.
The browser is not a problem
Meet lives in a tab, which defeats recorders that watch for a meeting app. RecordCue watches the microphone instead: when Chrome or Safari opens the mic for a Meet call, the cue appears naming it — Google Meet call — the same as it would for a native app. The other half, the voices Meet plays, is system audio, which RecordCue captures through the macOS screen-capture interface. No BlackHole, no Audio MIDI Setup, no extension in the browser.
The three steps
- Install RecordCue and leave it in the menu bar.
- Join the call — browser or PWA, free account or Workspace. The cue appears the moment the microphone opens, which is also the moment you would otherwise have forgotten.
- Press Audio only — or record the Meet window itself if the screen matters. Both sides go into one ordinary file; headphones change nothing.
When everyone leaves, RecordCue notices and asks whether to stop. The file is in ~/Movies/RecordCue/Google Meet/, and can be transcribed on the device with each passage marked as you, them, or both. No upload, no account, no bot tile in the meeting grid.
Tell the call
Meet announces its own recordings; it says nothing about yours, so you say it. In many places you must tell the other people, and in some you need their agreement — the FAQ has the longer answer.
RecordCue is free on the Mac App Store (macOS 13+, Apple silicon) — ten minutes per recording after a 14-day unlimited trial, one purchase removes the limit. Related: recording Zoom and recording Microsoft Teams.