4 min read · updated 21 Aug 2026

How do you record a Slack huddle on a Mac?

A huddle has no meeting link and no calendar event, so there is nothing for a notetaker bot to join. Slack’s own AI huddle notes are a paid-plan feature and they land as a canvas in the huddle thread, not on your disk. Capturing on your Mac works on any plan and leaves you the audio and a transcript you own.

The manual route.

A huddle is audio like any other, so the free route is the same one every Mac recording guide ends up at: build a device that can hear the speakers, hand it to QuickTime, and keep a second path open so you can still hear the call yourself.

1. Install BlackHole 2ch, the virtual audio device that shows up as a speaker and returns what it receives as an input.
2. In Audio MIDI Setup, build two devices. A Multi-Output Device of your speakers plus BlackHole, and an Aggregate Device of your microphone plus BlackHole.
3. Set the Mac’s output to the Multi-Output Device. Then record the Aggregate Device in QuickTime Player, under File and New Audio Recording.
4. Open Slack preferences and choose Audio and video. Pick the same devices there. Slack does not follow the system default.

Without this step the recording has your voice only. Slack keeps its own microphone and speaker selection under Preferences and then Audio and video. So a huddle can play through your real headphones while the Multi-Output Device you built sits idle as the system default. QuickTime still writes one mixed track, so afterwards nothing separates the two sides. The system audio guide covers the macOS route that needs no driver at all.

Where a huddle lives.

A huddle starts from any channel or direct message, with no calendar event and no link. A notetaker that joins scheduled calls from an invitation has nothing to attach itself to.

Slack gives the huddle a thread of its own while it runs, for notes, links and files. On paid plans Slack’s AI notes drop a canvas into that same thread afterwards, listing who was there, the topics and the action items. Guests do not get it, and neither does the free plan.

The free plan also caps a huddle at two people. Paid workspaces go up to fifty, and up to twenty-five with video switched on.

Checked against Slack’s documentation, 21 August 2026: the huddles article, the AI huddle notes article and the huddle preferences article.

With Aside.

Aside captures below the app, so Slack’s own device picker stops being part of the problem. It records the Mac’s system audio and your microphone as two streams, and a huddle is sound like everything else.

1. Grant the microphone and Screen & System Audio Recording. Two macOS prompts, once, at the start.
2. Press record when the huddle starts. There is no link to paste and no calendar event to match, which is the part that rules out most of the alternatives.
3. Stop, and read the note. Transcribed on your Mac and written into your folder as Markdown, with the audio kept beside it.

Nothing lands in the channel, so nobody else in the workspace inherits your notes by accident. The facts page is the short version of what the app does and does not do.

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