Routing sound in Windows is surprisingly difficult. Information technology's not supported natively at all, and while you can record audio output with tools like Brazenness, there'due south no way to send that output as an input to some other application. In that location'due south but 1 piece of software that does it well—VB Cable.

VB Cablevision creates a virtual link between your output and input—ship audio to an output, and it shows up as an input. This is useful if you desire to tape your desktop audio for mixing and sampling, but also if yous want to play things through your microphone. In games, for example, you could use this to annoy your teammates with in-game music, and while this is not something we endorse, the tech behind information technology is pretty cool.

To get started, head to VB Audio's website and download VB-Cable. You'll want to extract the download, right-click the "VBCABLE_Setup_x64" file, and then run it as Administrator.

Information technology will present you lot with this standard install screen, and so click the "Install Driver" button.

Your PC might require a restart but subsequently that, you should exist up and running. You tin configure some options with the VBCABLE_ControlPanel app, but it'due south and then simple you probably won't need to do whatever configuring.

To utilize it, correct-click the volume icon in your system tray and then click the "Sounds" command.

Switch to the "Playback" tab of the Sound dialog box. You should meet a new "Cable Input" device on your list of speakers and headphones. Select it and then set it as the default.

Now switch over to the "Recording" tab, and you'll run into a new "Cablevision Output" device listed with your microphones.

This virtual device finer transfers the audio from the video playing in the groundwork to a virtual microphone input. You tin now select this "microphone" in any app, or set it as default for all apps. The best role is that your standard audio is unaffected by this virtual device and you can use your real microphone whenever yous want.

Image Credit: Jinning Li/Shutterstock

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