Desktop Recording SDK vs Native and Cross-Platform APIs

There are a few ways to record desktop audio and/or video. These include native macOS APIs like CoreAudioTaps, AVFoundation, and ScreenCaptureKit, as well as Electron’s desktopCapturer API.

Here’s a comparison of these options with the Desktop Recording SDK:

Platform compatibility

Electron’s desktopCapturer API supports macOS and Windows, but CoreAudioTaps, AVFoundation, and ScreenCaptureKit are native to macOS and cannot capture data on Windows devices. The Desktop Recording SDK works across both macOS and Windows, and is designed to support every combination of meeting platform, OS, and browser.

Handling device issues

The Desktop Recording SDK can successfully record meetings across a variety of real-world edge cases, including devices with full disks, outdated OS versions, or bad network connections. If you use another API, you will have to manually account for all of these situations to ensure your meeting recorder works reliably in production.

Automatic meeting detection

The Desktop Recording SDK offers built-in meeting detection, while AVFoundation, CoreAudioTaps, and ScreenCaptureKit do not. These solutions cannot automatically determine when a meeting starts or ends, so users need to remember to manually start and stop a recording every time.

Electron’s desktopCapturer API can detect when a user’s microphone is active as a proxy for meeting detection, but this can lead to a large number of false positives. If using this API, the meeting detection prompt would appear whenever people use tools like WisprFlow, Loom, or any kind of voice-to-text features.

Video recording

When recording video, ScreenCaptureKit and Electron’s desktopCapturer default to capturing the entire screen rather than just the meeting window. As a result, other applications and background activity are recorded as well, creating distracting content in the recording and introducing privacy concerns.

Recall.ai produces high-quality video recordings that remain focused on the meeting window, even if a user switches tabs or minimizes the meeting. This means that private content like unrelated browser tabs and desktop notifications won’t make it into the recording. A common issue that other capture methods run into is poor video quality when the video transitions to picture-in-picture. The Recall.ai Desktop Recording API solves this issue, but no other desktop APIs or SDKs can address this video quality issue.

The Desktop Recording SDK also captures high-quality screenshares by detecting the window being shared and recording the source window directly. Other solutions record the screenshare from the meeting view, which significantly reduces the video quality.

Audio recording

When it comes to outgoing app audio, all the solutions handle it differently.

• CoreAudioTaps records system audio but not microphone capture. However, CoreAudioTaps can only record outgoing audio on macOS 14.2+, meaning developers will need to create a fallback path using a virtual loopback driver for users on earlier versions of macOS.

• AVFoundation supports microphone capture but does not capture system audio or outgoing app audio.

• ScreenCaptureKit can record both outgoing app audio and microphone audio on macOS 15+, but you must create a fallback for microphone audio for users on older versions of macOS (This is typically done with CoreAudioTaps. However, you would still need a virtual loopback driver or another fallback method for users on macOS versions earlier than 14.2)

• Electron supports both MacOS and Windows but relies on native API solutions like CoreAudioTaps for MacOS, which means it inherits many of the same limitations above.

The above solutions cannot capture both outgoing app audio and microphone audio for all devices. This means you will have to do additional work to create fallback paths, make sure the audio and microphone streams align, and maintain audio quality.

The Desktop Recording SDK captures both outgoing app audio and microphone audio and handles numerous audio edge cases, including:

Echo cancellation

Echo occurs when audio playing through the speakers is captured by the microphone, so the same speech ends up recorded twice. If you choose to build in-house, you will have to manually account for echo using an AEC library to avoid significant issues with audio and transcript quality. The Desktop Recording SDK comes with built-in echo cancellation.

Mute detection

The Desktop Recording SDK understands when a user mutes themselves in a meeting and will not record microphone audio when this happens. However, CoreAudioTaps, AVFoundation, ScreenCaptureKit, and Electron’s desktopCapturer API do not automatically support mute detection. If mute detection is not implemented, the application will continue recording against the user’s wishes, introducing distracting, unintended audio into the recording and potentially exposing private conversations.

Audio synchronization

Another challenge is ensuring outgoing app audio and microphone audio remain synchronized throughout the recording. When an application’s outgoing audio and microphone audio are captured through different APIs, each stream has its own timestamps, buffer sizes, sample rates and latency.

If this is not accounted for, the audio might experience drift – meaning that what the user says will not be aligned with the rest of the conversation in the recording. The Desktop Recording SDK combines and aligns the timestamps of microphone and outgoing app audio, automatically handling this complexity.

Diarized transcription

Electron’s desktopCapturer, AVFoundation, ScreenCaptureKit, and CoreAudio Taps do not generate speaker-labeled transcripts. Developers would not only need to build a transcription workflow themselves, but they’d need to figure out a way to collect participant names from the meeting in order to label the transcripts with who said what.

Moreover, desktopCapturer and all of the native Apple APIs offer a mixed audio stream, meaning that every participant’s audio is combined. This makes speaker attribution less reliable, as developers would need to manually separate the mixed audio by speaker.

Unlike any other solution, Recall.ai’s Desktop Recording SDK delivers meeting transcripts with speaker names. The Desktop Recording SDK extracts participant names from the meeting and attributes speech to the relevant person in the transcript, using actual names instead of generic labels like “Speaker 1.” The Desktop Recording SDK can also provide separate audio streams for supported meeting platforms, allowing for perfect diarization.

Ease of implementation

If you use APIs like CoreAudioTaps, AVFoundation, and ScreenCaptureKit to build in-house, it would take an engineering team multiple months to create a production-ready meeting recorder. Accounting for edge cases like mute detection and echo cancellation, as well as various combinations of meeting platforms, browsers, and operating systems, would take significant time and effort, and stability would be an ongoing issue. Once you ship a tool, you would need a team of 3-5 engineers dedicated to ongoing maintenance in perpetuity.

With the Desktop Recording SDK, you can bring a meeting recording product to market in 72 hours, and integrate the Desktop Recording SDK into an existing app in as little as five minutes. Recall.ai also offers an MCP server that allows you to connect agents that build or debug your integration, which further speeds up the process.

Feature breakdown for desktop recording solutions: