Voice Recorder

Record audio from your microphone, a tab, or your desktop — right in the browser. Nothing leaves your computer.

Voice Recorder 3.1 — What's New Version 3.1 is the biggest release this extension has ever had. Every part of the recorder was rebuilt: the way it captures audio, the way it protects your recordings, and the way it looks. Here is what changed. YOUR RECORDING CAN NO LONGER BE LOST The old version held your entire recording in memory until you pressed Save. If you closed the window, if Chrome crashed, or if your computer went to sleep, the whole take vanished — not a shortened file, nothing at all. That is fixed in two ways. Recording now happens in a background document, so closing the recorder window no longer ends your session; you can carry on browsing and come back to a recording that is still running. And audio is written to local storage every single second as it is captured. The worst an interruption can now cost you is one second. If something does go wrong, the recorder offers to restore the unfinished recording the next time you open it. A permission change in the middle of a session used to reload the page and silently destroy your audio. Now the recording is stopped and kept. FIXES THAT CHANGE WHAT YOU ACTUALLY GET Choosing a microphone now works. The old build passed your choice to Chrome as a suggestion rather than a requirement, so picking a USB microphone could silently record from the built-in one instead. Saved files now carry the correct extension. Typing "interview.mp3" over a WebM recording used to produce a file that claimed to be an MP3 and would not open properly in most audio editors. Filenames are now cleaned up and given the extension that matches what is genuinely inside the file. The device list no longer shows the same microphone three times, and it never falls back to displaying a meaningless device ID. Plugging in a headset updates the list immediately instead of requiring a restart. A serious freeze is gone. On a computer with no microphone, cancelling the screen-share dialog used to make the extension ask again, and again, forever, with no way out except forcing the window closed. Failures are now reported once and you retry when you choose to. Another failure could leave the recorder showing "Recording..." while capturing nothing at all, with the Stop button doing nothing. That path now always returns to a usable state and tells you what went wrong. NEW FEATURES A recording timer and live file-size read-out, plus a REC badge on the toolbar icon so you can tell at a glance that a session is running. Playback before saving. You can now listen to a take, and re-record if it is not right, without downloading it first. A local library. Recordings you save are kept on your computer so you can play, rename, re-download or delete them later. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. Format choice. WebM, Ogg, M4A and WAV, filtered to whatever your browser can genuinely produce. WAV export gives you an uncompressed file that opens in any audio editor. Input processing controls. Chrome cleans up microphone input by default, which helps speech and harms music. Echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control can each be switched off, and a one-click music preset turns off all three and switches to stereo at a higher bitrate. Record microphone and tab audio, or microphone and desktop audio, mixed into a single file — useful for interviews and tutorials. A level meter with a clipping warning, so you find out your input is too hot before you record twenty minutes of distortion. Silence handling. The recorder can stop automatically after a set period of quiet, and can trim silence from the start and end of a take when saving. A waveform trim editor for cutting the beginning and end of a recording before you export it. Global keyboard shortcuts for record, pause and opening the recorder, plus Space and Escape inside the window. Optional live transcription with subtitle export. This is off by default and clearly labelled, because it is the only feature that sends audio anywhere — everything else in this extension stays on your machine. ACCESSIBILITY AND LANGUAGE The interface now works with a screen reader and by keyboard alone: proper labels on every control, spoken status changes, and visible focus. The app name and description are translated into all 42 supported languages instead of appearing in English everywhere, and the four right-to-left languages — Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu — finally lay out correctly rather than being displayed left-to-right. A COMPLETELY NEW LOOK The recorder has been redesigned around a single dark display panel carrying the status, timer and live level bars, with a red record button and a redesigned source picker. There is a light and a dark theme, plus a compact layout for smaller screens. The old interface shipped a large styling library for a handful of visual elements; that is gone, and the extension is smaller and quicker as a result. PRIVACY Unchanged, and worth restating: this extension requests no access to any website, makes no network requests, and has no account. Your recordings stay on your computer unless you export them yourself.