So, the other day, I was messing around with my computer, trying to get a bunch of different audio sources to play nicely together. I had like, my game audio, music, microphone, and a couple of other things I wanted to control separately. I figured, “Hey, there’s gotta be a way to manage all these streams!” And there was. I ended up learning about creating a bunch of virtual audio cables and routing everything. Here’s how I did it.
Setting Up the Virtual Cables
First, I installed this software that lets you create “virtual audio cables.” Think of them like invisible wires connecting different audio sources and destinations on your computer.
I went ahead and created five of these virtual cables. I named them stuff like “Cable A,” “Cable B,” and so on, just to keep things straight.
Routing the Audio
Next, I opened up my sound settings. This is where it gets a little tricky, but bear with me.
- For my game, I set the output to “Cable A.”
- For my music player, I set the output to “Cable B.”
- My microphone, I left that going to the default input device.
- I had a couple of other programs, like a voice chat app, and I routed those to “Cable C” and “Cable D.”
So now, everything was going to these separate virtual cables, but I couldn’t actually hear anything yet.
Creating the Combined Stream
Here is the final step. I created another virtual cable, use “Cable E”, route all virtual cables created before to “Cable E”
Then I config the “Cable E” as my system default output, then every audio stream will be sent to system default output.
The Result
The cool thing is, now when I’m doing stuff on my computer, I have all these different audio sources playing nicely together. And the best part is, it all routed to one output. It’s a bit of setup, but totally worth it if you’re dealing with multiple audio sources like I was!
