Record a voice-over

A voice-over is the microphone alone, with no picture. Use it to record narration over your edit: it lands at the playhead, on a new track of its own.

Menu: File ▸ New Recording…
Keys: ⌥⌘N
Where: New Recording panel ▸ Source ▸ Microphone Only
Needs: The Microphone permission. Screen Recording isn't needed.
Agent tools: record_screen

Record a voice-over

Move the playhead to where the narration should start.
Choose File ▸ New Recording…, and set Source to Microphone Only.
Choose your microphone in Microphone.
Check Record Into: the project to land in, or New Project.
Press Record. Frame Job checks the Microphone permission, then counts down from 3.
Speak. The panel stays up while you do.
Press Stop. The button reads Stopping… and then Adding…, and the voice-over lands. The panel stays up, back on Record, ready for another take.

With Microphone set to Off, Record starts nothing and the panel says “Microphone Only records the microphone alone — choose a microphone first.”

The controls that only make sense for a picture grey out, keeping their values for next time: System Audio, Show Clicks, Size, Include Frame Job windows, Record the camera too, Cursor, Record shortcuts and the When it lands: boxes. The note under Size reads “no picture — the microphone alone”. Rate stays live, because it sets the frame rate of a new project.

Frame Job keeps Microphone Only in Source until you quit, then goes back to your display.

While it records

Nothing on screen is being filmed, so the panel stays up:

Its rows are locked.
The level meter stays live.
The footnote at the bottom left shows ● and the elapsed time, or ❚❚ and the time held still while paused.
Record reads Stop, and a Pause button stands beside it, reading Resume while paused.

The countdown and the menu-bar item work as they do for a screen recording, so you can also pause and stop from the menu bar, or from File ▸ Pause Recording and File ▸ Stop Recording (⌥⌘N).

Close takes the panel away and the voice-over carries on. To bring the panel back, click New Recording… on the Welcome window. ⌥⌘N won’t do it, because it stops the recording.

Where a voice-over lands

In an open project, each stretch between pauses is its own file, and they land end to end from the playhead on one new track at the back, named Microphone. It’s all one undo step, Add Recording. If a nest is open, they land inside it.

A voice-over always gets a new track. It never goes on an existing one, even one already named Microphone.

As a new project, the first file is the project itself, audio only at 1920×1080 and the frame rate in Rate. Later files follow it on its one track, as one undo step named Add Recording Segments.

Either way they’re ordinary audio clips, with everything in the Sound tab. To clean your voice up as it lands, tick Enhance the microphone when it lands.

The files

Each stretch is an .m4a file in ~/Movies/Frame Job Recordings/, named by the moment it began, for example Voice-over 2026-10-02 at 09.15.04.m4a. See Recording files and formats.

Good to know

Frame Job can’t make a voice from text. There’s no text-to-speech, so a voice-over is always a recording.
If the microphone stops on its own, for example because it’s unplugged, the voice-over ends there. What was recorded lands, and the note reads “The microphone stopped recording on its own: … The voice-over ends where it stopped.”
A file too short to fill one frame stays in the Media tab without a clip, and a note says so. If that’s every file, no Microphone track is added.
A project already at its track limit can’t take the new track. The files stay on disk and the note names them. See Limits.

With an agent

record_screen records a voice-over too. An agent gets your Mac’s default microphone rather than a chosen one, and there’s no countdown. Of the screen settings, it can pass only rate, which sets a new project’s frame rate. See Record with record_screen.

Record a voice-over