Separate Game Audio, Discord, Music in OBS! (A Voicemeeter Tutorial For Beginners)

how many of you guys were told about a program called voice meter and you look up a tutorial and the first thing you see is this thing you're like what the hell does any of this mean man who am i a scientist i get it it looks complicated and scary but trust me once you get the hang of it it's actually really intuitive to use and probably the best free audio software that you're ever going to come across for streaming you've never heard about voicemeeter before it's basically like a free digital mixer that you can use to separate audio like your game audio discord or spotify let's say for example you're playing a game and you're listening to music in your headphones but you don't want your stream to hear that music because i don't know maybe you're listening to michelle branch or something and you're really embarrassed about it you can mute the music just for your stream but still have the game audio go out to all your viewers you can also use voice meter to process your mic's audio so it sounds really good for your stream however i don't recommend that because frankly i think there are better solutions for processing your audio which i've already done in another video so we won't be covering any of the audio processing in this video but we will break down voicemeeter so that it's very easy to understand and show you how you can use it to have complete control of your audio for your stream [Music] what's up guys it's nutty so let's put aside actually installing voicemeeter because it's really important that you have a really clear picture about what voicemeeter actually does so that you understand how to actually use it for controlling your stream's audio let's start with how most people's audio is set up you basically have obs sending a single audio track to twitch which is eventually what your viewers hear your typical obs setup will have two main audio sources your microphone is pretty self-explanatory it's basically the thing that you make noises with your mouth into and then you have this thing called desktop audio and the way you can think of this is basically if you hear this in your headphones or your speakers this is exactly what's going to be captured by desktop audio in most cases this is going to be the audio from all your programs so from all the games that you're playing discord spotify or anything you listen to music out of all of those programs get combined down into a single audio source which as you can tell is a problem because you as the streamer want to control what your viewers hear and what you hear individually so we're going to scrap this whole setup and replace it with something else imagine a big box and this box has a bunch of inputs and a bunch of outputs you can think of your inputs as things that you can plug into this box and those could be physical things like a microphone or they can be programs on your computer like spotify or discord those physical things are what's known as hardware input devices and those programs are what's known as virtual input devices and this box happens to have three hardware inputs and two virtual inputs now the outputs on this box are things that hear audio so again these could be physical things like speakers or headphones that sound actually comes out of or these could be programs that listen to audio such as obs now this box has a bunch of buttons on them which can control which inputs go to which outputs for example i can plug in my game audio into one of these virtual inputs then use this box and tell it to output the audio to my headphones and to obs but if i'm listening to music i can plug in spotify into another virtual input and then tell the box to only output that audio to my headphones and not output to obs so basically the box that allows us to do all this stuff this is what voice meter is all it is is software that you can plug audio devices into and then route it to other devices that will receive that audio so does that give you guys a clearer picture of what voice meter does just say yes gavin okay because i never want to do diagrams like that ever again in my entire life so let's actually get into installing voicemeeter so i've left a link in description box down below for where you can actually find the install you'll notice that there's three different variants of voicemeeter there's voicemeeter regular voicemeeter banana and voicemeeter potato and they're basically all the same the main difference is that they just have a different number of inputs and outputs we're gonna go with voicemeeter banana because voicemeeter potato has the most inputs and outputs but it also costs money you're also gonna wanna install vb cable virtual audio device i haven't told you what this is for yet but this is going to make sense in a little bit by the way i should have mentioned at the start of this video that this video is for windows only so if you're using a mac you just got prank son after you've installed everything it's gonna make you restart your computer so when it restarts just open up voicemeeter banana this is what it's gonna look like when you open it for the first time now like i said i know it looks scary and complicated so let me simplify this for you remember how i said earlier that we're not going to be processing our mic at all in this video well that means we can just ignore all of these controls because all these controls are for controlling how your audio sounds so we're not even going to touch any of these we're also not going to be doing any recording in voice meter so this tape recorder thing in the corner which by the way it's 20 20 man we don't use tape recorders anymore so just get that out of here also just a little pre-setup go into the menu and make sure auto restart audio engine is checked and run in system menu at startup this will just make sure that voicemeeter starts every time you restart windows so now we're just left with a bunch of columns which are our inputs and our outputs the five columns on the left are the three hardware inputs and the two virtual inputs from the diagram i showed you earlier and the five on the right are the three hardware outputs and two virtual outputs we're gonna set up our hardware output first so we can actually hear something so just click on a1 and then a drop down will appear and just select whatever your headphones or your speakers are you're gonna see each audio device listed multiple times but with the prefix wdm or ks or mme they're basically all the same audio devices they just use different drivers we're gonna choose the wdm version of our speakers if you want to set up a second device like headphones you can set that in the a2 column exactly the same way next we need to tell windows to pass audio into voicemeeter because right now audio is still getting passed directly to your speakers or directly to your headphones to do that go into your control panel and then search for change system sounds and then this window should pop up in the playback tab you'll see a list of devices and one of the devices is gonna have a green check mark in it which is probably gonna be your speakers or your headphones this is the device that windows is routing all of your audio into and we don't want that we want our audio to be routed through voice meter if you scroll to the bottom of that list you're gonna see two devices that say voice meter input and voice meter aux input the naming is really confusing this but basically voice meter input corresponds to that first virtual input in voice meter and aux input corresponds to the second virtual input in voice meter we're going to choose voice meter input and select set default and if you've done it right you can start playing any audio it could be of youtube video it could be music your favorite hentai i don't care whatever you want you should see the meter for the first virtual input moving up and down and you should also hear the audio coming out of whatever device you set as your a1 hardware output now if you have two hardware devices set up like i have the first being your speakers the second being your headphones you'll notice that the audio is only coming out of your speakers and not your headphones and the reason for that is because if you look at the first virtual input you'll see these buttons that say a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 you'll see that we've only selected a1 so these buttons tell you where to route the audio okay so far this setup not very useful all of our audio is still being sent to this one virtual input so all of our audio discord music it's still going through this one channel so now we're gonna start to separate our audio out we'll start easy we're gonna pull out discord's audio from the rest of our audio because right now discord is still pointing at the same virtual input device that all of our audio is pointing to so all we're going to do is we're going to go into our discord settings go to voice and video and then change our output device to voicemeeter aux input remember that the aux input corresponds to the second virtual input in voicemeeter so now if you do a mic check in discord and start talking to your mic you should see the second meter in voice meter move up and down then you can use the a and the b buttons to choose which audio devices you want your discord audio to come out of so in my case i want my discord audio to come out of both my speakers and my headphones so i'm gonna choose a1 and a2 so now your discord audio is completely decoupled from the rest of your audio but you're still going to hear your teammates you know like calling you names because you're a terrible teammate in apex and then you're going to be like crying because they're all bullying you and stuff but nobody in your stream is going to be able to hear that because they can't hear the discord audio now that may be how you want it set up not the crying part but you might want it set up so that you can hear your discord and your stream can't but chances are you probably do want your stream to hear the discord audio so how do we do that you're going to go into obs go into your sources right click and add an audio capture device and you're going to set the device to your voicemeeter aux input so this is basically going to capture all the audio that's being fed into that second virtual input device then just make sure that you've added this audio output capture source into every single scene that you want your discord audio to be heard so this is a good setup so every time you just want to mute your discord audio so that your stream can't hear it you just mute that audio source in obs and that'll just mute just your discord but leave the rest of your audio completely untouched but let's say we wanted to add another layer of complexity to this and we wanted to add music to our stream and let's say our music is coming in through youtube in a chrome browser and we want all that audio to come in yet another audio source in obs this is a bit complicated because you'll notice in voicemeeter we don't have any more virtual inputs anymore so what are we going to do we're just going to pull a virtual input out of thin air uh yeah kind of remember how we installed vb cable basically what vb cable does is it allows us to turn one of our hardware inputs into another virtual input remember that these hardware inputs can only be used for things like a physical microphone but by installing vb cable we can plug another program like youtube into one of the hardware inputs to do that we're going to select input on our hardware input 1 and then we're going to scroll down to where it says cable output then we just have to tell youtube to point all of its audio to that vb cable output because right now all of youtube's audio is still going through the default windows audio device which is that virtual input device that we set earlier how do we tell youtube where to output its audio if you go into your pc settings go into sound settings and at the bottom it should say app volume and device preferences you can see a list of all the programs playing audio on your pc and you can change the output device for each program so if you're playing your music off spotify or chrome or whatever people play music off nowadays you just need to change the output for that program to cable input if you've done it correctly the first hardware input in voice meter should now be moving up and down when you're playing music or any audio from that program again you can use the a and the b buttons again to decide which devices that audio comes out of so again i'm going to set a1 and a2 on because i want to hear the music in my headphones and in my speakers then an obs we can do exactly like we did for discord we just add another audio output capture device select cable input as our device and then now we have a third channel that we can route audio to by now you should have three audio devices in obs plus your microphone which you can all independently control without affecting each other which will allow you to mute your discord in your stream but still hear it in your headphones or even allow you to mute your music in your headphones and still come out in your stream you just have complete control over your audio now but let's just say you wanted to go even crazier and add even more programs as separate channels at obs because you know you're greedy and three just isn't enough for you you can download up to two more of those vb cables they're called vb cable a and vb cable b by the way all the naming for all of these different channels really sucks for voice meter it's really confusing anyway vb cable a and b are pretty much exactly the same thing as vb cable it's just you get two more of them but you do have to pay for them but they do function exactly the same as vb cable so if you want to turn your other two hardware inputs into virtual inputs well then you can pay to download vb cable a and b but that's gonna do it for this voice meter tutorial guys i know this video was not funny okay i could i could only fit like five jokes into that video which is like way less than the number of jokes that i usually fit into videos i even wore like an elmo shirt today so i can like make you guys laugh and i didn't even you didn't even see it for the whole video but if you'd like to laugh at my crappy jokes come watch me on twitch.tv nutty i actually changed my name this week so nutella forever he's dead now we're twitch.tv nutty also if you want more help for setting up your stream we're setting up voice meter because you couldn't figure it out through my crappy video make sure to join the discord link in description box down below other than that this video is done class dismissed i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: nutty

Views: 1,152,730

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Id: XD9sWOjITYU

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020