Guide

How to share your PC audio in Discord

Discord sends your microphone, not your computer. Here is why the obvious fixes fall short, and the one arrangement that actually works — while your friends can still hear you talk.

You want to play a song, a clip, or a film for the people in your call. You press play, and nobody hears it. Ask why and you get a dozen answers involving Stereo Mix, screen sharing, and something called a virtual cable. Most of them half-work.

Why it does not just work

A voice app listens to one input device — your microphone. Everything your PC plays goes the other way, to an output device. They are separate paths, and nothing joins them by default. That is not Discord being awkward; it is how Windows audio is arranged, and every voice app inherits it.

So sharing what you hear means giving the voice app an input that happens to carry your output. Every working method is some version of that. The methods differ in how much collateral damage they do.

The usual answers, and what is wrong with them

Stereo Mix. An old loopback input some sound cards still expose. When it exists it is easy — and it captures everything, including the call itself, so your friends hear themselves echoing back a beat late. Many modern devices do not offer it at all.

Screen share with sound. Fine for a moment of a game, poor for music: the audio is compressed for video, it stops when the share stops, and everyone has to be watching a stream to hear a song.

Hand-wired virtual cables. The correct idea, done manually. Install a cable driver, change your default device, discover your own audio has now vanished from your headphones, change something else to get it back. It works, and it takes an evening.

What actually works

Send a copy of the audio you want to share into a virtual cable, and point the voice app's microphone at the other end of that cable. A copy, so your headphones are untouched — you keep hearing the song exactly as before.

Soundscape does this as a drag:

1. Open Soundscape. If you have no virtual cable, it installs one — and if you already run SteelSeries Sonar, VB-Cable or Voicemeeter, it uses the cable you have rather than adding another.
2. On the board, drag the app whose sound you want to share — Spotify, a browser tab, a game — onto the cable.
3. Drag your microphone onto the same cable, so it carries your voice and the audio together.
4. In Discord: Settings → Voice & Video → Input Device, and choose the cable.

Your friends now hear the track and you. You hear everything as you did before, at the volume you set, because what went down the cable was a duplicate rather than a diversion.

Things worth knowing

Only what you choose is shared. Because you pick the app rather than the whole system, your notifications, your other calls and the rest of your desktop stay private. That is the practical advantage over Stereo Mix, which shares the lot.

Set the balance. Music at full volume will bury your voice. Each source on the cable has its own fader — pull the music down until you sit on top of it.

It is not only Discord. Anything that lets you choose a microphone works the same way: Zoom, Teams, Slack, OBS, a browser call.