[Guide] Voicemeeter & You: Partners in Audio

If you go into Voicemeeter, look in the upper-right and click on menu, there’s an option to bind your volume buttons to whichever channel you want.

I had a problem with Discord not picking up my mic. Turns out if you give it a balanced signal, Discord assumes you’re giving it stereo instead, combines both of them and sends…not a lot. It’s almost like adding 1 and -1. My fix was to get Voicemeeter to pan my mic all the way to the left and have Discord pick that up instead. Worked a charm.

oh wow, I literally never noticed that. Good find!

One alternative if Voicemeeter intimidates people and/or they just don’t like it might be Elgato Sound Capture. It functions essentially the same and all you need is virtual audio channels on your PC. What it does is become the default audio device and then you just “tick” where you want the sound to be heard.

What I generally do is:

  1. Make Sound Capture send audio to Virtual Line and Headphones
  2. Make Discord/Skype send sound to Headphones
  3. Make whatever my sidestream is only capture the Virtual Line
  4. Make OBS that’s streaming to Twitch capture Headphones

This leads to the sidestream only having game audio and the main stream having both. Again, you can do this all in Voicemeeter, and with more control, but since Discord lets you adjust individuals’ volumes and OBS and capture cards all have their own audio options, this might be a quicker and less-intimidating approach unless you’re doing something REALLY convoluted.

Due a few changes in Windows 10 as well as cable input, I’ll be changing a few things in this guide to reflect the new UI/setup

Alright, the long awaited (at least long-delayed) update to Voicemeeter & You: Partners in Audio is done

This update now covers

-Windows 10 configuration updates

-Updates to Voicemeeter Virtual Audio Cable

-Why Discord needs badly to change it’s character limit in audio source picklist

If there are any issues or complaints, please send them my way

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I’ll be honest, I’ve read through this guide several times and I’m baffled. I understand that Voicemeeter uses virtual audio cables, but since as far as I can tell those cables just record system audio and can’t differentiate between applications, I don’t see how they accomplish anything. Is it for special cases that don’t apply to anything I’ve ever wanted to do?

For some reason I’m having incredible difficulty putting into words what I want to do, even though what I want is very straightforward: I want to do live commentary with a friend, and I’m streaming the game to him on Discord.

Between Discord and OBS, this can be done without a hitch, except that OBS will be recording his audio on my end, and will be recording it to the same track as the game audio, because they’re both system audio and are, as far as OBS is concerned, the same source.

So can Voicemeeter (or another program) deal with that, and if so, how? (I know this forum is virtually dead, but hopefully someone can answer.)

thankfully I still get notifications when ppl reply!

So yeah, I understand what you’re trying to do, you wanna record but put you and your co-commentator on the same audio track and keep the game audio separate, there are a few ways to do this (thankfully things have changed a lot since I wrote this guide) but here’s what you can do:

If you follow the guide as listed above (especially with the OBS and Discord settings) it will do what you want, namely putting you and your discord audio on one track and your game audio on another track in OBS, and then you can set OBS to adjust values and record each audio track and video as separate files (so a mute video and 1 or 2 audio tracks). Either that or you could record your commentary only in OBS and use shadowplay to record the game (so long as your comp can handle it)

in either case what I’d do is set things up like they are in this guide, just don’t hit that B1 in virtual inputs that shares your audio with your co-commentator, so something like this:


and then share screen/audio with your partner in discord. This should move both your voice and the discord commentary to the ‘mic/aux’ setting in OBS

lmk if this works for you! Good luck

Between your guide and a video tutorial linked on Voicemeeter’s website, I was able to figure it all out. It’s confusing because everything to do with audio is confusing, but the basic idea is actually pretty straightforward. I did a quick test video with my friend and everything worked perfectly.

In my opinion it’s not complicated because it’s audio, it’s just that the Voicemeeter interface is atrocious. By comparison, here are a couple of screenshots of Rogue Amoeba’s macOS audio applications. (taken from The flexibility of Audio Hijack 3 – Six Colors and Rogue Amoeba | Loopback: Cable-Free Audio Routing)

Audio Hijack (top) is designed to let you record whatever audio sources are available on the machine in whatever combination, but also allows for some level of audio rerouting, while Loopback (bottom) is purely for rerouting audio. And notice that their interfaces are extremely readable, for most tasks it’s really clear what you’re doing, where audio is coming from and where it’s going to.

So, even though audio is a complex subject, this aspect definitely doesn’t need to be. Most software developers just aren’t interested in using the tools at their disposal to create a clear visual language, or don’t have the time or money to get someone who knows how.

Speaking of, PipeWire has made this same deal really simple on Linux. It’s just Windows that’s behind now.