If Chrome closes or crashes while Audio Recorder – Voice Recorder is recording, the audio captured up to that moment is not thrown away. The next time you open the popup, the unfinished take appears in the Recordings list with a recovered tag, ready to play, trim, or download.
You lose the last moment before the browser went away, not the whole session. Here is what to expect and what to do with a recovered take.
Why a closed browser does not wipe the take
The extension writes audio into your browser's local storage while it records, rather than holding everything in memory until you press Stop. When the browser disappears mid-take — a crash, a forced restart, a laptop battery hitting zero, or closing the window — the parts already written stay on disk.
When you open the popup again, the extension looks for takes that never received a proper stop and marks them as finished:
- Takes that contain audio are kept and tagged recovered.
- Takes that never received any audio are removed, since there is nothing to play.
The recovered take keeps its original name, for example 2026-10-15 21.05, so you can tell when it started.
What does not end a recording
Some things look like they should interrupt a take but do not:
- Closing the popup. The recorder keeps running in the background. Open the popup again to see the timer and press Stop.
- Switching tabs. A microphone take continues. A tab audio take keeps recording the tab it started on.
One thing does end tab capture early: closing the tab being recorded. With Tab audio as the only source, the recording stops on its own, and the take is saved normally rather than recovered.
What to do with a recovered take
- Play it. Press Play and listen to the last minute. That is the part most likely to end abruptly.
- Trim the ragged end. Press Trim, drag the end handle back to a clean point, and press Save trim. See Trim the start and end of a recording.
- Rename it. A note like
Lecture week 6 – recoveredreminds you later why it stops short. Tips in Rename and organize a long list of takes. - Download it. Once the file is on your computer, it no longer depends on the browser.
When a recovered take will not play
Most recovered takes play like any other. If one shows "Couldn't play this recording.", try downloading it as WAV and opening the file in your computer's audio player. If that also fails, the captured data may be too incomplete to decode. A recording will not play back walks through the remaining checks.
A recovered take is missing
A few situations explain an empty list after a crash:
| Situation | Why there is no take |
|---|---|
| The crash happened during the countdown | Recording had not started yet, so no audio was captured. |
| The take was silent the whole time | A take with no audio data is removed instead of recovered. With Skip silence on, a take can stay at Waiting for sound without capturing anything. |
| The disk ran out of space | Audio could not be written. See Not enough space to save a recording. |
| The browser profile's site data was cleared | Local extension storage was wiped along with it. |
Habits that make crashes less painful
You cannot prevent every crash, but you can limit how much one costs you.
Use auto-stop for long sessions. If you record a two-hour lecture, set Auto-stop to 120 minutes. The take ends cleanly even if you walk away. Countdown and auto-stop timers lists all the options.
Split long recordings. Three 40-minute takes are easier to handle than one 2-hour take, and a crash only affects the current one. I split anything longer than an hour; it also makes trimming faster.
Keep the laptop plugged in. A sleeping or powered-off computer ends the browser session like any crash.
Download important takes the same day. Recovery protects you from a closed browser. It does not protect you from deleting the take, uninstalling the extension, or clearing browser data. Uninstalling the recorder and your local files explains that last case.
Is the recovered audio sent anywhere?
No. Recovery happens entirely inside your browser's local storage. There is no account and no upload of audio to any server, crash or no crash. For the storage details, see Where browser recordings are stored.