To record a lecture: get permission (or an approved accommodation), put your phone close to the lecturer with Do Not Disturb on, record with the phone’s built-in recorder, and rename the file straight after class. Then turn it into text the same week, because an hour of audio you never replay is not study material.
Below: the rules on recording lectures, how to get a recording that’s actually clear, the best apps for iPhone, Android and laptops, recording online lectures, and what to do with the file afterwards.
The short answer
- Check the rules. Ask the lecturer at the start of term, or get recording added as an accommodation through disability services. Recordings are for your own study; don’t share them.
- Sit close, phone facing the speaker. Distance is the biggest cause of bad lecture audio.
- Use the recorder you already have. Voice Memos on iPhone, the built-in recorder on Android, or a note app that records alongside your notes.
- One file per lecture, renamed with course, week and topic.
- Turn it into text within a day or two, and study from the text, not the audio.
Is it legal to record lectures?
Usually yes, for your own study. But the rule that decides it in practice is your university’s policy and your lecturer’s say, not wiretapping law. This is general information, not legal advice.
United States. Federal law (18 U.S.C. 2511) lets you record a conversation you are part of. About 11 states require consent from everyone: California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan (with caveats), Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Oregon and Missouri require it for in-person conversations. Many of these laws cover only private conversations, and a lecture to a hall of students often isn’t one. So what really applies is your college’s policy, which can ban recording or leave it to each professor.
The big exception is disability. Under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, colleges may not ban tape recorders for disabled students who need them, so recording lectures is a common accommodation, arranged through the disability services office. You usually sign an agreement that the recordings are for your personal study only.
United Kingdom. Universities set their own lecture recording policies. Some, like St Mary’s University, Twickenham, let all students make audio recordings for personal use. Others require permission unless recording is in your support plan. For disabled students, recording is often granted as a reasonable adjustment under the Equality Act 2010.
Everywhere else. Ask the lecturer, and check your university’s regulations. The rule that holds almost everywhere: personal study is fine more often than not, and sharing or posting the recording is not.
Read your agreement before using AI tools. Some accommodation agreements forbid uploading recordings to any outside service. The University of Colorado Boulder’s terms, for example, explicitly include “Artificial Intelligence technologies”. If yours says that, ask the lecturer before you transcribe the recording with an online tool, including ours.
Where to put the phone
The microphone in any recent phone is good enough. Where you put it matters far more than which app you use.
- Front rows, phone facing the lecturer. Every row back adds echo and room noise. If the lecturer is fine with it, a phone on the front desk gives the clearest result.
- Not in your pocket or under a notebook. Fabric and paper muffle the voice, and handling noise is loud.
- On something soft and stable. A pencil case under the phone stops desk taps and vibrations from being recorded.
- Big hall with a microphone? Sit near one of the room’s speakers. You’re recording the PA system, which is often clearer than the lecturer’s natural voice.
- Do Not Disturb or airplane mode. A phone call can stop or pause a recording on some phones.
- Test 30 seconds before the lecture starts and listen back once. It takes less time than discovering a silent recording the night before an exam.
The best apps to record lectures
iPhone: Voice Memos. Already installed, records for as long as you have storage, and on iPhone 12 or newer with iOS 18 it shows a transcript in 10 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. The Notes app can also record and transcribe inside a note. Our guide on transcribing voice memos covers the languages and what to do when transcription doesn’t show up.
Android: the built-in recorder. Every Android phone has one; names vary by brand. On Pixel phones, Google’s Recorder app transcribes as you record and lets you search the text.
Note apps that record: Notability, Goodnotes, OneNote. These record audio while you take notes and let you jump from a note to the moment it was written. Useful if you handwrite on a tablet. The recording stays inside the app, so check how to export the audio if you want to transcribe it elsewhere.
Live transcription apps: Otter and similar. They transcribe while the lecture happens. Otter’s free plan has monthly minutes and a per-conversation limit, and its help page lists only six transcription languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Simplified Chinese), so it suits lectures in those languages and nothing else.
A laptop. Possible, but laptops pick up your own typing, which is louder than the lecturer at the back of a hall. If you use one, Voice Memos is built into macOS and Sound Recorder into Windows. A phone on the desk usually sounds better.
A dedicated recorder or clip-on mic. Worth it only if you record every day in large halls, or if your accommodation includes one. Some disability services lend recorders.
Recording online and hybrid lectures
- Zoom: local recording saves an MP4 video and an M4A audio file to a Zoom folder on your computer, but only if the host allows participants to record. Cloud recordings are shared by the host.
- Microsoft Teams: meeting recordings are saved to OneDrive or SharePoint, and downloading them is controlled by the organizer, so ask your lecturer if you don’t see a download option.
- Blackboard Collaborate, Panopto and other lecture capture: your university may already record lectures. Check the course page before recording yourself. Downloads are off unless the instructor allows them, and some systems give you their own captions.
After the lecture: turn the recording into text
An hour of audio takes an hour to replay. A transcript takes a few minutes to skim and seconds to search. Here’s where Braindump fits, and we make it, so judge accordingly: you upload the lecture recording in your browser on a laptop or phone, choose the language it was taught in (59 languages), and get the whole lecture in paragraphs with a title and a short summary to start from. If there are questions from the audience, speaker labels separate the voices. You can export the text as PDF, Word or TXT.
The free plan covers 3 files a day, up to 2 hours each. There is a 10-hour lifetime cap on free use. A lecture longer than 30 minutes comes back as a free preview: only the first 5 minutes are transcribed, and the summary and export stay locked. The full transcript of a long lecture needs Pro. It doesn’t record in the browser, so record on your phone first, and it doesn’t produce subtitles or flashcards.
Once you have the text, how to turn a recorded lecture into study notes covers the 10-minute process from transcript to revision questions. If you have ADHD and recording is part of how you study, see studying with ADHD using recorded lectures.
Mistakes that ruin lecture recordings
- Recording from the back row. A common reason a transcript comes out patchy.
- Recording the whole day as one file. You’ll never find Tuesday’s 11am lecture inside a six-hour file.
- Not checking the first recording. A muted mic or a full phone is easy to fix in week one and painful in week ten.
- Never reviewing. Recordings pile up fast. Turning each one into text within a day or two keeps the backlog at zero.
- Sharing it. Even when recording is allowed, posting a lecture in a group chat or online usually isn’t.