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Hi my name is Chris and this is Battle(non)sense
When you record your gameplay,
then the audio of the game, microphone and Discord,
Teamspeak or whatever Voice Over IP solution you use to talk to your friends,
usually get mashed up in a single audio track.
If you record your gameplay just for yourself, then this is not necessarily an issue.
But if you want to share it with others, or use it on your YouTube channel,
then you might want to just record the audio of the game,
or you want to be able to manipulate these audio sources individually
so that you then can adjust the volume or use filters like noise reduction.
I’ve been using a setup for a very long time now,
which I briefly mentioned in my 'ShadowPlay Alternatives' video.
So today I will show you how you can achieve that in 4 simple steps,
without spending a single cent on additional audio hardware or software.
That said, if you like the software that we are going to use here,
then you should consider to make a small donation to support the creator of VoiceMeeter.
Now what do you need to separate these audio sources.
Step 1 go to vb-audio.com
click on Audio apps and download the VB-cable driver
Then click on the VoiceMeeter tab and download VoiceMeeter
Step 2 Extract the VoiceMeeter setup zip file
Run the VoiceMeeter setup
And install the audio device software
Then extract the vbcable zip file
And move it to a save place on your hard drive
Like near the installation directory of VoiceMeeter
Then right click on the vbcable setup
Select run as admin
Install the driver
And then reboot your system
Step 3 Now right click on the speaker symbol
Select playback devices
Find VoiceMeeter Input
Select it
And click on ‘Set Default’
Now all applications will send their audio to VoiceMeeter
Next go to the Windows Start Menu
Type in 'voice'
And click on VoiceMeeter
In case that you increased the text size in Windows,
you might get a very large VoiceMeeter window
To fix that you right click on VoiceMeeter
Then right click on the VoiceMeeter entry at the top of the list
Select properties
Go to compatibility
And tell VoiceMeeter to ignore the windows DPI value
Then close and re-open VoiceMeeter for the changes to become active
Since all applications send their audio to VoiceMeeter now,
you must ensure that it is always running,
or you will not get any audio at all.
To do that you click on menu
And select 'System Tray (Run at Startup)'
Now you must tell VoiceMeeter what it should do with the audio that it receives.
So you click on A1 and select the Speakers of your sound card.
In case that you also use the digital out, or any other output on your sound card,
you can select that for A2.
So now the audio of all applications goes to Virtual Input of VoiceMeeter,
which then sends that audio to the Speakers and the digital output of my sound card.
But we don’t want all applications to use that Virtual Input,
we want that our Voice Over IP tools like Discord, Teamspeak and Skype
use the Virtual Audio Cable, so that we get separate tracks for the Game Audio and Voice Over IP.
To achieve that you go to the audio settings inside your Voice over IP software
select your microphone as input device
and 'CABLE Input' as 'output device'
Now discord will send its audio to the 'CABLE Input' device,
which means that you can use that as a separate audio track.
But we still want to hear what our friends have to say.
So, you have to come back to VoiceMeeter
And select 'CABLE Output' as an Input device
Now the audio from our Voice Over IP software as well as the audio from any other application,
is sent to hardware out A1 and A2.
If you are not scared of VoiceMeter Bananas more complex UI,
then you can do one very cool thing with that version of this software.
Here you can say that you do not want to hear the audio of the Voice Over IP software on
your surround sound system which, is connected to A2,
the digital out of the soundcard.
This means that when you talk to your friends on discord then you will only hear them through
the speakers of your headset,
but not on the surround sound system
which might be playing some music.
So that is all that you have to do to provide your recording software with separate sources
for the audio of your game, VoiceOver IP and your microphone.
One thing that you must be aware of is that driver updates
might change your default playback device.
Should this happen then you might not get any audio at all,
or in case that your monitor supports it,
you might suddenly have your PC use the speakers built into your monitor.
When this happens then you only have to go to your playback devices,
select VoiceMeeter input
and make it your default audio device again.
Step 4
Now that windows provides all these different audio sources,
we just have to tell our recording software what it should do with them.
In DxTory you go to audio
And change the first audio device to 'Voice Meeter Input'
Which is the audio of the game
Then you add a 2nd audio stream where you select 'cable input',
which is the audio of your Voice Over IP software
And lastly you add a 3rd track
which is your microphone
So now all your recordings will come with 3 different audio tracks,
that you can then easily manipulate in the video editing software of your choice.
The setup process is very similar in other tools like Bandicam or Action!
However not all screen capture tools allow you to have more than 2 audio tracks.
Shadowplay does not even allow you to select the primary audio device.
So due to the limitations of these tools
you will probably only use them when you want to record just the audio of the game with no chatter.
The software that I used to capture gameplay is OBS.
To setup these 3 different audio tracks there you go to settings and then audio
For the desktop audio device, you select 'VoiceMeeter Input'
For the desktop audio device 2, you select 'CABLE Input'
And for the mic you select your microphone
Then right click on the audio sources inside the mixer
and rename them.
Then right click again and select Advanced Audio Properties
In here you then set Game Audio to track 1
Voice over IP to track 2
And your Mic to track 3
Now go back to the settings again
Select Output
and change the output mode from 'simple' to 'advanced'.
Then click on the audio tab and enter the names of the audio tracks
You can also change the bitrate here if you want to.
Now you must tell OBS to record these audio tracks
So you go to recording and enable audio tracks 1, 2 and 3.
I use the ts or transport stream recording format because the recorded video file will
then survive a crash of the game, your system or OBS.
Also Adobe Premiere can handle ts files with multiple audio tracks.
But I won’t dive deeper into the video recording settings in this video here,
as that is a very big subject where the best configuration will strongly depend on your personal needs
and your hardware.
However, you might want to check out the video I linked to in the description down below,
where I explain how I use a 2nd graphics card as NVENC encoder,
to reduce the impact that recording with OBS has on the performance of the game.
What I do want to talk about a bit,
is what you can do when the GameCapture source
can’t hook into the process of the game that you want to capture
which means that it can’t record the game then.
Destiny 2 actively blocks any and all external tools,
so you just can’t record that game when it runs in exclusive full screen mode.
But for any other game, you can try to select the process directly inside the properties
of the Game Capture source.
If it still doesn’t work, then you should try to run OBS as admin.
I actually changed the OBS shortcut properties to always run it as admin,
as that usually prevents that issue from happening on my system.
If the GameCapture source still can’t capture your game, then you should check if you have
any other tools running in the background which provide an in-game overlay.
Like MSI Afterburner or the stand-alone version of RTSS.
You might also want to try and disable the overlays provided in origin, steam or uplay.
So that’s it, you can now either record all 3 audio sources separately
and manipulate them in the video editing software of your choice,
or can record just the audio of the game without any chatter.
Let me know in the comments what you think about this setup,
and if you have an idea for a tutorial that I should do in the future then I would love to hear it.
If you enjoyed this little tutorial then it would be great if you could support me on patreon,
as it’s the awesome support that I get from my patrons which keeps Battle(non)sense alive.
You can find a link to my patreon in the description down below,
where you will also find links to my social accounts
in case that you want to stay up to date on the videos that I am working on.
So, if you enjoyed this video then please give it a like,
subscribe for more and I hope to see you next time!
Until then, have a nice day and take care,
my name is Chris and this was Battle(non)sense