I recently became a PC gamer, again. By that I mean it’s been more than a decade since I was one and now I’ve gotten back into it after mainly just gaming on a console. While the experience so far has been great, I ran into the issue of how to stream or record a live session using OBS Studio while also chatting on Discord, without having my Discord chat also being in my game recordings. Long story short, it’s pretty much impossible unless you use a third-party app that can separate the audio for you. That app is going to be VB-Audio VoiceMeeter Banana.

First, let’s set up VoiceMeeter Banana. You’ll need to download it from the link above. You don’t need to pay to use it personally, but buying a license helps the developers out. After installation, look for the VoiceMeeter Banana application in your Start Menu and click it. You should see the window above. The portions I highlighted in red are what you want to pay attention to. That’s all you’ll need to get this to work.

What I have labeled as “Discord” and “Game” are the Virtual Inputs. The left one is VoiceMeeter VAIO and the one on the right is VoiceMeeter AUX. Just keep that in mind. I had renamed them to what they go to so I would remember.

The box labeled A1, A2, and A3 are your outputs. Here you’ll choose your headphones, speakers, or whatever you want the sound to output to. I only use A1 and A2. One is for my headphones and the other is for my speakers.

Next up, let’s set up Discord. Under the “User Settings” head over to the section marked “Voice & Video”. Input setting is the mic you’re using. The output setting which would normally be your speakers or headphones should now point to VoiceMeeter Input (VB-Audio VoiceMeeter VAIO).

Now comes OBS Studio which will require some bit of work. Go to the Scene you’re using and under the Source box, create a new source called “Discord”. Here, you want to set the Device up as “VoiceMeeter Input (VB-Audio VoiceMeeter VAIO)”. You’ll now see it in the Audio Mixer box. You shouldn’t need to mess with the “Mic/AUX” one, but just in case, make sure it’s pointed to your mic. Lastly, set your Desktop Audio device to be “VoiceMeeter Aux Input (VB-Audio VoiceMeeter AUX VAIO)”.

Lastly, you’ll want to set your desktop audio in the taskbar to be “VoiceMeeter Aux Input (VB-Audio VoiceMeeter AUX VAIO)” as well when you’re ready to stream or record with everything on.

And that’s pretty much it. You’ll need to have VoiceMeeter Bana running in the background so now while you’re recording, head into OBS Studio and you can just mute or lower the volume in the Discord source and/or Mic source. That leaves the game audio on and won’t mess with that while you’re free to enable or disable Discord audio from your recording, but you’ll still be able to hear your party in your headphones.

Anyways, that’s how I’ve been doing it and it took quite a bit of research before I found the right combination of apps and settings for this to work. I’m sure there are probably other ways of going about this, so if you have other means, please share them in the comments below. Thanks!