Limelight Forums

Introduction

Many of you will know how to use the stereo mix method to play sounds down the microphone, but that prevents you from being able to use your microphone or have in-game sound playing. This guide will show you a quick and easy way to be able to play sound files from your PC through your microphone so that you're still able to hear in-game sound and talk with no problems.

Now, this works by creating a soundboard that you must manually play sounds from or you can hit a keybind if you've set that up. It has some disadvantages to it such as being unable to play music straight from YouTube but I think that the advantages are worth it.

If you have no need to use a microphone then you can just skip over the Virtual Audio Cable parts and get straight to the soundboard.

What you need:

There are two pieces of software you'll need for this, the download links are provided.

Virtual Audio Cable: https://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm
Exp Soundboard: https://sourceforge.net/projects/expsoundboard/

Setting up Virtual Audio Cable:

Once you have the software installed, open the control panel for it in administrator mode. At the top left where it says 'Cables', set the amount to 1, no other settings here need to be touched so close the control panel.


I have two set up but only one is needed for the purposes of this tutorial

Now you'll need to open up the 'Audio Repeater (MME)' program, this is what is used to redirect the sound channels.
For Wave In you need to set that to your microphone device.
For Wave Out you need to set that to Line 1.
If Line 1 isn't showing up in the drop-down then right click your sound icon in your notification area, select 'Recording Devices' and check that Line 1 is enabled.

Please note that this is something you'll have to do every time you open up Virtual Audio Cable, but it's very quick.



Exp Soundboard:

For the first output, set that to your speakers.
For the second output you'll need to set that to Line 1 and then tick the 'Use' box.
From there you'll want to add your sound files, just click the 'Add' button and select the file you want to play. You'll also see that sounds can be key bound, a very useful feature. When you close the software you'll lose any sound file settings unless you save the soundboard, you can have multiple soundboards for different roleplays if you want.



Steam:

This is the last thing to setup, in your Steam software just click 'Steam' in the top left, click 'Settings' and go to the 'Voice' tab. Then just set the recording device to use Line 1 and you're done. If you already have Garry's Mod open then you'll need to restart to take effect.

One optional thing I'll recommend if you haven't already done so is setting up Garry's Mod to start in windowed borderless mode as you may have to keep tabbing out to play sounds. Just right click Garry's Mod in your library, click 'Properties', click 'Set Launch Options' and add the line:


Change this to the resolution you play with if needed.

Resources:

And you're done, the soundboard should now work in-game. Just remember not to use this to micspam. Enjoy!

Here are a few resources that you may find useful:

Youtube to MP3: Extracts the sound from a YouTube video and allows you to download the sound file: https://www.youtube-mp3.org/

SoundDogs: A huge library of sound effects. They are price tagged but you are simply able to right click the MP3 icon and 'Save Link as' to get them for free: https://www.sounddogs.com/

thank you!

It's probably the best way to do it but a "bit" complicated (at least compared to my way)

You can just use your phone (or another laptop or whatever) and plug a male to male from your phone's headphones input directly to your Pc's mic input. Then change your default mic.

(Aug 6, 2015, 06:11 PM)Tzimanious link Wrote: [ -> ]It's probably the best way to do it but a "bit" complicated (at least compared to my way)

You can just use your phone (or another laptop or whatever) and plug a male to male from your phone's headphones input directly to your Pc's mic input. Then change your default mic.

That would be a good solution too if you used Virtual Audio Cable so that you can use your microphone as well.

I've always wanted to know how to do it, unfortenately though me and technical things don't get along too well so it's too complicated for me

there is a way to do this without buying VAC (the trial version has a voice saying "Trial" every 2 seconds or something)

you can use vb-audio, it works almost same as VAC, creates a virtual audio input and output: https://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Cable/index.htm
its donationware, which is why its free

however, you need to set "CABLE Output" the default device when rightclicking on the volume button, clicking on recording devices, and rightclicking on CABLE output and setting it as the default device
then, to be able to talk without problems, rightclick on your microphone in recording devices, select "Listen to this device", and set the playback device to "CABLE Input"

Pretty nice guide.

How bad does this run on CPU's?

Great job.