A free screen recorder for Windows, Linux and Mac that saves into your notes

Barside is a free screen recorder for Windows, Linux and Mac, that saves every recording into a note. Choose a screen, a window or audio only, add your microphone, your computer's sound and a round webcam bubble, and press Start recording. When you press Stop & save, the video plays inside the note, ready to trim, export or share with a private link. Recording needs no account and adds no watermark, and the only cap is size: up to 1 GB per recording.

A free screen recorder for Windows, Linux and Mac, inside your notes

Barside keeps each recording where the work is: in the note about the bug, the lesson, the client or the project. The note holds your written steps, a checklist, links and the video together, and all of it travels in your backups.

The recorder can capture:

• A whole screen, on any monitor, part of a screen (choose Part of the screen and drag across the part you want), or one window, with Screen + audio.
• Sound only, with Audio only: a voice memo, a practice talk or a podcast take.
• Your microphone and your computer audio (the sound playing on your computer), alone or mixed together.
• A round webcam bubble over the screen, with a blurred or replaced background if you like.

Recordings play right inside the note. You can jump to any point, and the player's full-screen button fills the monitor; press Escape to come back to the note.

How to record your screen

1. Open the note the recording belongs to and click the video icon in its toolbar, Record screen or audio into this note. Or choose Create → New recording, which first makes a new note called Recording. In the search bar, typing rec does the same, and so does Record on the Recordings tab, described below.
2. Choose Screen + audio or Audio only.
3. Tick Microphone, Computer audio, or both. Computer audio includes every app that plays sound, even when you record a single window.
4. Under Choose a screen or window, pick a monitor or one window. Whole screens come first, and the first one is already picked; the refresh button updates the list.
5. Pick a Quality, Standard or Share-friendly (see below), and turn on Webcam bubble if you want your face in the corner.
6. Press Start recording. The recorder folds into a small bar with a timer, a pause button and Stop & save.
7. Press Stop & save. Barside says Recording saved in your note. Choose Done, or Export WebM to save a copy anywhere.

Opening the recorder never records anything by itself: recording starts only when you press Start recording. You can also stop from the tray menu with Recording · Stop and save. To open the recorder from any app, give New recording a hotkey in Settings → Hotkeys and aliases.

While you record, you can keep working. The recorder stays open when you move to another note, and the recording is added to the note you started in without touching anything you typed there in the meantime. Quitting Barside, or closing a pinned note, waits for its recording to stop.

Add your face with the webcam bubble

Turn on Webcam bubble in Screen + audio and choose a camera, a size (S, M or L) and whether to Mirror it. As soon as a whole screen is chosen, the bubble appears on it as a live preview, bottom-left the first time, so you can place it before you record. Drag it anywhere on that screen, or point at it to change the size and mirroring. It stays on top of other windows and never takes keyboard focus, so your typing still goes to your app.

Background offers None, Blur, Remove (only you), or one of five ready-made backgrounds: Studio, Sunset, Ocean, Mint and Paper. Filter offers Touch up (a soft glow), Bright, Warm, Cool, Vivid, Mono and Vintage. Barside finds you in each frame with MediaPipe models that run on your computer. When your graphics card is fast enough, a stronger model takes over after a few seconds and keeps hair and caps whole. Until the first outline is ready, about a second, the camera shows strongly blurred, so your room stays private.

The bubble is recorded as part of the screen. Three things to know:

• It needs a whole screen. Recordings of one window do not include it, because only that window is captured.
• It uses the camera only, never the microphone, and only while the preview or the recording runs.
• If the camera is missing, busy in another app or unplugged, the bubble closes, the recorder tells you why, and the recording continues without it.

Quality and file size

Pick the quality before you record. Barside remembers it, along with your camera and bubble settings, on this computer.

Audio-only recordings always use Standard. Recordings are saved as WebM files and written to disk in pieces while you record, so a long session does not fill your memory. The microphone uses echo cancellation and noise suppression, and when you record both sources, Barside mixes them into one soundtrack. When a recording reaches 1 GB (roughly 40 minutes at Standard's full bitrate, close to two hours at Share-friendly), Barside stops, saves it in the note and tells you why.

Trim the start and the end

Every screen recording and audio recording in a note shows its length under the player, with Trim and Share link (videos also get Make clips). Trim opens an editor below the player:

• Drag the start and end handles on the timeline, or click the timeline to move the playhead.
• Type exact times: 01:23.4, 83.4 and 1:01:23.4 all work. The target buttons set a handle to the playhead.
• On the keyboard, the arrow keys move a handle by 0.1 second (with Shift, 1 second), Page Up and Page Down by 5 seconds, and Home and End to the ends. Space plays the selection and Escape closes the editor.
• Play selection plays only the part you keep.

Save trimmed clip writes a new file and swaps it into the note in one step, so Ctrl+Z brings the original back. Trimming copies the recorded data without encoding it again, so it is fast and loses no quality. Large files show progress and can be cancelled, and a cancelled trim leaves nothing behind.

One catch: a video can only start on a keyframe, so the start snaps to the nearest keyframe at or before your choice, and the editor says Starts at the nearest keyframe. On the start handle, the arrow keys step from keyframe to keyframe. Barside records a keyframe every second, so the start moves by at most about a second.

To cut out the middle, remove filler words or add captions, choose Make clips and edit the video by its words in Clips.

Share a private link

Share link under a recording opens the share dialog. Give the link a Title for the watch page, choose how long the Link lasts, and choose Create link: Barside uploads the recording and copies a link that plays on barside.space. Anyone with the link can watch in a browser, without Barside. You need a free Spaces sign-in to upload. The dialog also lists your active links, where you can copy or remove each one; removing a link stops it at once.

Barside Plus costs US$20 a month or US$200 a year, plus sales tax. On the free plan, Share-friendly quality keeps about five minutes under the 50 MB limit, and trimming helps too. The file itself is never public: each viewer gets an address that works for 10 minutes. Read how share links work.

Every recording on the Recordings tab

The Recordings tab in the sidebar, between Meetings and Clips, lists every recording and video in your notes in one place: screen recordings, audio recordings, meeting recordings and other videos, such as files you added and clips you made. The sidebar shows how many there are. In the search bar, type recordings to open it.

• Filters. All, Screen, Audio, Meetings and Other videos sit at the top, each with its count. A filter other than All shows only when it has something in it.
• Search. The box Search recordings and their notes… finds a recording by its name or by the title of its note.
• Play on the card. Each card plays the recording right there, in a video or audio player, and shows its length, file size and date. The note's name on the card opens that note.
• Save a copy. The download button next to the name saves the file wherever you choose.
• Share link and Make clips. Share link makes a private link, as described above. Videos also have Make clips, which opens the clips editor.
• Record. The Record button at the top starts the screen and audio recorder, and the recording is saved in its own new note. With more than one workspace, the Save in menu next to it picks the workspace for that note.

If a recording's file is gone, its card says "The file is missing. Restore it from a backup." Default, Writer, Team and Creator Mode show Recordings in the sidebar, and Creator Mode opens on it. Reader Mode keeps it on the More tab.

Ways people use it

• Bug reports. A developer records the steps that break a form, trims the dead air, and copies the error text with screen text capture into the same note.
• Client walkthroughs. A consultant records a two-minute tour of a dashboard in Share-friendly quality, with the webcam bubble on, and sends a 7-day link.
• Lessons and tutorials. A teacher records a lesson in the note that holds the handout, then turns the best minute into a vertical clip with captions.
• Explaining with a sketch. Open an Excalidraw drawing in a note and record while you draw the idea.
• Community updates. A Space owner records a weekly update and posts the link for members in Spaces.

The recorder saves sound, not text. To get a written transcript of a call, with You and Others labels, use call transcription. To record a video meeting with other people, record from the meeting window, where everyone sees who is recording. And if recording and clips are most of your work, Creator Mode in app modes keeps Recordings, Clips, drawings, your notes and Spaces in the sidebar, and opens on Recordings.

Windows, Linux and Mac details

Barside runs on Windows 10 and 11 and on 64-bit Linux (an AppImage for most distributions, or a .deb for Ubuntu and Debian), and on Mac. The recorder works the same on each system, with small differences:

• Computer audio. Windows records it through its loopback. On Linux, Barside uses loopback from PulseAudio or PipeWire. In Barside for Mac, it needs macOS 14.2 or later: Barside's own sound helper records it, and macOS asks once to allow System Audio Recording. On older macOS, Barside says so, and you record the microphone only.
• The tray. The Recording · Stop and save item lives in the tray menu. On GNOME, the tray icon needs the AppIndicator extension; the recorder's own Stop & save button works everywhere. In Barside for Mac, the same menu opens from the menu bar.
• Hotkeys on Wayland. Hotkeys work while an X11 app is active. To use one everywhere, add its command from Settings → Hotkeys and aliases as a desktop shortcut.

Privacy: where recordings live

Recordings are saved in Barside's media folder on your computer, as part of your library, and ZIP backups include them. They leave your computer only when you choose: a share link uploads that one file to Barside's Spaces storage (Supabase), and Barside Plus cloud backup (encrypted on your computer first) and cloud sync carry your whole library. Webcam backgrounds find you in the picture on your computer, and camera frames are not uploaded. Read more about local-first storage and backups.

Computer audio can include other apps, like a call or a video playing in the background. Tell people before you record them, and check what is playing. The privacy guide explains recording and screen context.

How it compares

Loom describes itself as the video messaging platform for work, with your videos stored online and shared as links. As of September 2026, its free Starter plan allows screen recordings of up to 5 minutes each and up to 25 videos per person. Barside records to your own computer with a 1 GB size cap instead of a time limit, and you upload only what you choose to share. For the full comparison, read the Loom alternative guide.

On Windows, the Snipping Tool also records a part of the screen (Win+Shift+R), and you can edit the video in Clipchamp afterward. OBS Studio, free and open source software for recording and live streaming, is built for scenes, many sources and an audio mixer. Barside sits in between: quick to start, with a webcam bubble, trimming, clips and share links, and every video filed in the note it belongs to. For more options, see the best screen recorders for Windows and Linux; several of them also run on a Mac.

Works well with