Install Audio Recorder – Voice Recorder from the Chrome Web Store, pin the icon, and you can record from the toolbar. The first take takes about a minute.
1. Pin the icon
After installation, Chrome opens a short welcome page. Open the extensions menu (the puzzle piece), then pin Audio Recorder – Voice Recorder. The icon stays on the toolbar, so you do not have to hunt for it later.
2. Choose what to record
Click the icon. Three sources sit at the top of the popup:
- Microphone records your voice or the room. Chrome asks for microphone permission the first time. Pick Default microphone or a specific headset or USB mic, and set the volume slider if the input is quiet.
- Tab audio records the sound of the current tab: a lecture, a web player, a call in the browser. You keep hearing the tab while it records. No microphone prompt appears. Internal Chrome pages, including Settings and the Web Store, cannot be captured. Open a normal website first.
- Both mixes the microphone and the tab into one file.
3. Record
Press the round button. By default a 3-second countdown runs, then the status reads Recording. The waveform and the timer show that sound is coming in. Pause and resume as often as you like; the session stays one file. Stop when you are done. You can close the popup while a take is running. Alt+Shift+R starts or stops, and Alt+Shift+P pauses or resumes. Change those shortcuts from the link in the popup, which opens chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
4. Keep the part you want
The take appears in the list with its own waveform. Play it back, rename it, and trim it by dragging the two handles. The shortest trim is half a second. Then download WebM (the default), OGG, WAV, or MP3. Share uses your system's share sheet when Chrome offers one.
Settings worth a look
Noise suppression and echo cancellation are on by default. Skip silence is off: turn it on if you want the take to pause while the room is quiet and resume when sound returns. Quality is High (128 kbps) unless you switch to Standard (64) or Best (192). Channels default to mono. Auto-stop is off until you set a duration from 1 minute to 3 hours. Settings stay locked while a recording is running.
If the browser closes
A take that was still running when Chrome closed is kept and marked recovered, so a long session is not thrown away. Recordings live in this browser until you delete them. Uninstalling the extension removes its local data, including the library.