If you love playing multiplayer video games with your friends then you must have used Discord. But if you are also planning on streaming your gameplay you might be reluctant to live stream your conversation with you friends. In that case, it would be natural for you to ask, how to exclude Discord from OBS?
OBS does not have a built in functionality to exclude or mute Discord, You will need to use a 3rd party software like Voicemeeter to manage your audio sources to exclude Discord audio from OBS audio.
Voicemeeter is a 3rd party audio mixing software that can be used to mix and route multiple audio sources to multiple audio outputs. It is available for free and can be downloaded from their official website.
Below is a step-by-step guide to excluding Discord audio from OBS, however, this does work with any other audio source you might want to exclude from OBS.
Step 1: Install VoiceMeeter Banana
You can download Voicemeeter from here: https://vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/banana.htm
Download and Install the software as you would any other software.
Step 2: Install Virtual Audio Cables
You will also need to download and install a virtual Audio Cable from Voicemeeter, this allows you to simply route audio from one source to another.
You can download Voicemeeter cables from here: https://vb-audio.com/Cable/index.htm
Step 3: Open VoiceMeeter
The window of Voicemeeter might look complicated, but don’t get scared by its look. It will not take a lot of knowledge to work with this. Actually, a lot of options are going to be ignored, including the tape recorder on the right panel and the upper portion of the left panel, so don’t be afraid.
Step 4: VoiceMeeter Pre-setup
Go to the menu in the top right corner. Check the “Auto Restart Audio Engine”. Then check the “System Tray (Run at Startup)” option. By doing these, the Voicemeeter will start automatically every single time you start your computer.
Step 5: Set up hardware outputs
Hardware output setup is necessary for your viewers to hear the audio. Click on “A1” from the top right corner (under the menu button), and you will see a drop-down menu. Select the headphones you are going to use. Yes, you need to connect your headphones before starting the setup.
You might see the same audio devices in the drop-down menu again and again. Don’t worry, they are all the same with different drivers. Select the “WDM” version of your speakers. If you want to set up a second device, head to the “A2” button and select another device from there.
Step 6: Set up windows
At this point, your audio is still passing through audio devices instead of Voicemeeter. So you need to set up windows settings. Head to your system’s control panel and search for “Change system sounds”. When you find that option, click on it and a dialog box will appear.
In that dialog box, you will see a bunch of devices and one of them will have a green tick mark. That is the device used by windows for outputting all of the audio streams. Scroll right and look for “Voicemeeter input” and “Voicemeeter aux input”. Choose “Voicemeeter input” from there. Click on “Set Default” and you are good to go.
Step 7: Optional Voicemeeter settings
If you have two audio devices and added both of them in step 5, you will notice that only one of your devices is working now. In order to make both of the devices work, select “A2” from Voicemeeter virtual inputs. Now play a song, YouTube video, or anything you want and see the difference.
Step 8: Setting up discord
Launch discord and go to settings. Click on the “Voice and Video” option. From the voice settings, change the output device to “Voicemeeter aux input”.
Step 9: Back to Voicemeeter
Now choose the output devices you want to hear discord audio from. If you have both of the devices set, you can select one, or two, and set up other audio devices. The choice is yours and I am not going to interrupt you in this section.
That’s it. All of your discord audio is going to the virtual device, so you can hear them but OBS can’t. OBS is using the hardware devices for streaming and hardware does not get the discord output. Therefore, your viewers are not going to hear noise from discord at all.
Including Discord Audio Occasionally to OBS
If you have followed the steps in the last sections, your viewers do not listen to your discord chit-chat anymore. But in the future, you might need to make the audience hear audio from discord. Think of a situation when you are collaborating with some other streamers and playing with them in a friendly team.
Then you would definitely want the people to hear your conversations. But now that you have installed Voicemeeter, discord audio does not get recorded by OBS. So, what to do now? Uninstall Voicemeeter and get everything normal again? No, that’s not an efficient solution. What you can do is to let OBS capture audio from Voicemeeter for your occasional stream.
In order to do that, you need to follow the steps below. In that way, it will be more efficient and take less time and energy to accomplish the task.
Step 1: Open OBS
Launch OBS and get to the main screen. Do not start recording right now as you need to change the audio source.
Step 2: Add a new source
From the bottom panel, add a new audio source for discord. Select “Voicemeeter aux input” for capturing discord audio. You may want to remove the hardware input device but that’s not necessary unless you made Voicemeeter capture all of the audio itself.
To get back to previous settings, just remove the Voicemeeter input and/or add the hardware input. It should work fine as before.
Conclusion
If you have read the whole article, I have no doubt that you now have learned how to exclude discord from obs. Voicemeeter is an excellent free app that you can use to get your streaming career started without wasting too much cash to just exclude your Discord audio for your streams.
I sincerely hope that this article was able to help you start your streaming career. Thanks for tuning in and until next time, farewell.
