Microsoft Teams has a built-in audio-only recording mode. It is not a separate button — it lives inside the normal recording flow, two menus deep, and most people never scroll far enough to find it.
This page walks through Microsoft's own steps, the permission checks that have to pass before the option is even reachable, and the one thing the official documentation leaves open: what file you actually end up with.
Before you start
Three conditions have to be true before recording of any kind is available to you.
1. Permission is checked on two people, not one. Microsoft's admin documentation is explicit about this: "Both the organizer and recording initiator need to have recording permissions to record the meeting or event." That is an AND, not an OR — your own policy being correct is not enough if the organizer's is not.
2. Both people need a listed license. Microsoft's support page for recording says: "Both the meeting organizer and recorder must have one of the following licenses: Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, E5, F3, A1, A3, A5, M365 Business, Business Premium, or Business Essentials."
3. Your role has to qualify. The same page's role table allows the meeting organizer and a person from the same org to start and stop recording, and blocks a person from another org or company, a guest, and an anonymous participant. Microsoft states it again in plain language: "Guests can't record meetings. Federated users can record calls, but not meetings."
One useful detail if you are the one recording: "The organizer doesn't need to be present." Their policy has to allow recording; their body does not have to be in the call.
There is also a non-obvious dependency worth knowing before you go hunting through menus. Microsoft repeats the same note across three admin pages: "When organizers turn off Microsoft Copilot in Teams meetings and events, recording and transcription are also turned off." Turning off an AI feature turns off recording with it.
The steps, as Microsoft writes them
From Microsoft's "Start, stop, and find meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams" page, under the heading "To record audio only":
- Select More actions in your meeting controls.
- Select Record and transcribe, then Start recording, then More options.
- Then, verbatim: "From the Choose what to record dropdown menu, select Audio only."
- Select Confirm.
Step 2 is where nearly everyone stops. Pressing Start recording looks like the end of the flow, and it starts a normal video recording. The audio-only choice sits behind More options on that same panel, in a dropdown labelled Choose what to record.
Step 4 is not decoration either. Microsoft's troubleshooting page for missing recordings says it directly: "The recording only starts once you select Confirm." If you dismissed that dialog, nothing was recorded — and Microsoft adds that in that case the recording "can't be recovered."
Audio only is a convenience-recording feature
This is the limitation that catches regulated teams. Microsoft's introduction to recording compares the two systems side by side, and the last row of that comparison table reads:
"Audio only supported Yes No"
The "Yes" column is native convenience recording — the ordinary recording you start from the meeting controls. The "No" column is third-party compliance recording. If your organization runs compliance recording, Microsoft notes that "recording will start automatically every time you join a meeting" and that "this recording will be stored in your org's storage and not your personal OneDrive or Microsoft SharePoint." That automatic capture is not the flow described above, and the comparison table marks audio only as unsupported for it.
What you actually get, and the honest gap
Here is where the documentation stops. The official Teams pages we could find do not state what file extension an audio-only recording produces — whether it lands as an audio file or as a container with no video track is simply not written down. Do not trust a forum answer on this one; check the official documentation, or record a two-minute test meeting and look at what appears in OneDrive.
What is documented is the format of an ordinary meeting recording. In the steps for playing a recording from a channel, Microsoft writes: "The recording is an .mp4 file and has the Recording icon at the beginning of the line." That single sentence is the only place the extension is stated outright. (Note that .mp4 is a container — the video and audio codecs inside it are not specified anywhere in Microsoft's recording pages, so don't infer them.)
That gives you a path with no guesswork in it: record the meeting normally, then pull the audio track out of the .mp4 yourself. You know exactly what goes in and exactly what comes out.
Try it right here
Runs in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.
This runs inside your browser tab — the recording is read from disk, decoded locally, and handed back as an audio file. It is never uploaded to a server, which matters more than usual for meeting recordings. If you want the general-purpose version of the same job, extract audio from video handles other containers too, and all Clapr tools are in one place.
Size is a real reason to do this. Microsoft's storage planning guidance states: "The size of a one-hour recording is 400 MB." It also notes that "Teams meeting recording files live in OneDrive and SharePoint and are included in your quota for those services." A recurring two-hour call is roughly 800 MB of video eating your quota every week, when what you needed was the talking.
Where the file lands
Which OneDrive it goes to depends on what kind of call it was:
| Type of call | Where the recording is saved |
|---|---|
| Meetings and events | The organizer's OneDrive Recordings folder — "even if the organizer didn't attend the meeting or event" |
| Channel meetings | The channel's SharePoint site, in a Recordings folder under Documents |
| 1:1 and group calls | The OneDrive of "the user who selected Record" |
That third row is the one that surprises people: for a one-to-one call, the file follows whoever pressed the button, not the person who placed the call.
Common mistakes
- Treating Start recording as the last step. The audio-only dropdown is behind More options, after you have already pressed Start recording.
- Expecting it in a compliance-recorded meeting. Microsoft's comparison table marks audio only as not supported for third-party compliance recording.
- Assuming a long meeting produces one file. The cap is "4 hours or 1.5 GB" — either one, whichever comes first — and Microsoft writes that at that point "the recording ends and automatically restarts." See why a Teams recording splits into multiple files.
- Leaving the meeting to stop it. Microsoft: "Recording continues even if the person who started the recording leaves the meeting."
- Assuming you get a transcript too. Transcription is a separate toggle. Microsoft states: "If recording is turned on, but transcription is turned off, the recording doesn't have a transcript file stored next to it."
FAQ
Does Teams record audio only as an MP3? The official pages we could find do not say what extension an audio-only recording produces, so treat any specific answer with suspicion and check the official documentation. What Microsoft does document is that a meeting recording "is an .mp4 file" — so if you need a known audio format, extracting the track from the MP4 is the route you can verify yourself.
Can a guest start an audio-only recording? No. Microsoft's role table blocks guests, anonymous participants, and people from another org from starting or stopping a recording, and states plainly that "Guests can't record meetings."
Why is the Audio only option missing from my Teams? Work through the tooltips Microsoft lists on its "I can't record a meeting" page — they name the actual cause, from "Unavailable for this meeting due to organization policy" to "Only meeting organizer and co-organizer can start recording for this meeting." One of them is easy to miss: recording can be "Unavailable because Copilot is turned off for this meeting."
Does an audio-only recording still generate a transcript? Transcription is a separate feature you turn on separately; Microsoft's pages describe recording and transcription as distinct, and the pages we could find don't single out audio-only recordings on this point. If you do run transcription, Microsoft says organizers and co-organizers "can download it as a .docx or .vtt file" — more on that in downloading a Teams transcript.
Where does the recording go if the organizer has no OneDrive? Microsoft describes a fallback chain: a co-organizer's OneDrive first, then the OneDrive of the user who initiated the recording, and if none of those exist, temporary async media storage.
More Teams walkthroughs are in the how-to guides, including what format a Teams recording is.
All limits and quotes on this page come from Microsoft's official Teams documentation on learn.microsoft.com and support.microsoft.com, checked 16 September 2026. Microsoft revises these pages regularly — verify against the official source before relying on them.
