Problem: I want to be able to pipe audio from some application into my microphone, so I can overlay sound effects into games. This is not for the intention of “mic spamming,” but a similar concept applies.
I want to play youtube videos, audio files from Winamp, or whatever, into my “Mic” device. Obviously this will be a virtual microphone, and not a real microphone, since I don’t want all the delay/interference of playing audio into a physical speaker and sending it back thru a physical microphone. The sound quality is horrible, inaudible and is very annoying.
One more aspect of the problem: I don’t want to replace my entire microphone line with just YouTube. I want to be able to speak and have YouTube playing into a game/Skype chat/stream/etc. Something that allows piping multiple audio sources into a single line, simultaneously.
Best Answer
If you're trying to record the audio of something you are watching online, you can do that with the Stereo Mix option in Windows. It's available in Windows 7 for any device, but it should be available on most audio devices in Vista and XP.
To enable it in Windows 7, right click on the speaker icon in your task bar and select Recording Devices. You will be presented with the following screen:
If the Stereo Mix option is not showing, you may have to enable it by right-clicking the box of devices and select Show disabled devices. Once it's visible, right click Stereo Mix and select Set as default device and you're done. When you use any program to record, it should now pick up any sounds that are being played through your sound card at the moment. Just be aware that this means it will pick up other system noises as well (like email or IM notifications, system errors, etc.).