Help Catch what matters, skip what doesn't

Choosing which sounds count

Any sound loud enough records, or choose Only these sounds — glass breaking, barking — to ignore the rest.

Settings › Sound › What starts a recording has two choices:

Any sound loud enough (the default): loudness alone decides.
Only these sounds, then tick which — speech, glass breaking, a dog barking, a cat meowing and more. A sound must be loud enough and recognised as one of them, so a recording starts for glass breaking but not for a dishwasher finishing.

The sentence under the choice says exactly what will record, and so does the main window's Sound panel. Sound only starts recordings while that panel's switch is on; this pane says so when it's off.

Recognition is imperfect and works on short sounds. A category that never seems to fire is usually one whose sound is quieter than the sensitivity threshold, so it never gets as far as being classified.

The classifier runs on this Mac and adds measurable CPU while monitoring. If sound matters less to you than the machine staying quiet, leaving it off and relying on loudness costs nothing.