How to download your Twitter Spaces audio

Twitter Spaces, the company’s growing Clubhouse copycat audio rooms, gives Twitter users a new space to meet and chat with their Twitter community about everything from civil rights to NFTs to securing tech jobs. As the company pushes Spaces to replace its failed Fleets experiment, it may pick-up traction as a new tool for online networking. But like most interactions on Twitter, an engaging talk in Spaces can still feel, well, fleeting. The best way to preserve a good discussion is to record it — maybe you want to review the Space you just hosted or send a recording to someone who couldn’t make it to a talk.

There is a simple way to download a copy of your Twitter Spaces audio, but the option is a bit hidden and takes a few steps.

The only way to download Spaces audio right now is to download an archive of your Twitter data. On your desktop, you can find this option by opening your profile, clicking on “More” in the left-hand sidebar and navigating to “Settings and privacy,” then “Your account, and finally “Download an archive of your data.” On mobile, the navigation is the same except the last step is titled “Your Twitter data” and you’ll be asked to open up Twitter in a mobile browser. Both options require you to verify your identity.

In this menu you can request an archive of your Twitter data, which will include audio from any Spaces you’ve hosted over the past 30 days.

Once you’ve requested your archive, just sit back and relax until Twitter notifies you that the archive is available to download. This can take up to a few days if you’re a heavy Twitter user.

Twitter only holds on to audio from Spaces and attached captions for 30 days (or for an additional 90 days if the Space was reported for some reason and Twitter is investigating a rules violation), so we recommend requesting your data immediately after ending a Space you’d like recorded. Of course, if you have multiple Space sessions lined up in a given week, you could wait until your last one to save yourself a bit of time in the archive request process. Just be careful — once that data is gone, its gone.

Right now there’s only an option to download audio from Spaces that you’ve hosted, so there’s no data saved for Spaces you join — you’ll have to ask the host to go through this process.

Obviously this isn’t the smoothest way to record a conversation online, especially compared to heavily-used chat options like Zoom that allow the host to record from the start, let participants request to record and deliver recorded materials soon after the session ends. If Twitter Spaces can develop a more direct, accessible way to record rooms, it’d be a great place for online meet-ups and public forums of all sorts. Every Twitter feature is eventually tackled by third-party developers too, so a solution could emerge from the community if the feature gains traction in tech communities.

Until then, you’ll have to deal with Twitter’s backdoor data downloads.