How to play audio such as music on VRChat using VoiceMeeter Banana

vrchataudiotutorial.md

Overview

Anyone who has played VRChat has surely noticed that there are players who go around using custom sounds, ranging from music to sound effects.

This is achieved through 3 main methods.

1. Using your physical microphone to record the audio.

• This is the easiest but worst method. As you can imagine, you have to fumble around to set up a way for your microphone to hear your speakers, and the audio quality won't be any good.

2. Adding audio to avatars.

• This limits you to specific sounds, and requires some work. Additionally many people find it to be annoying, because it is repetitive and sometimes very loud (resulting in them blocking you, or having audio blocked for all avatars) and also for you, since it can be triggered accidentally quite often.

3. Feeding audio from your computer directly into VRChat.

• This is the best method, and can be done in multiple ways.

  • To only play audio that you have a file for, the best method is to use something like Soundpad. Soundpad allows you to choose specific files to play, and you can even create hotkeys and favorites to quickly get that sound effect you want. (Note: I don't recommend purchasing Soundpad on Steam, as it will always say you are playing it - and Steam has not provided a way for developers to turn that off. Buy it directly from their website instead.)

  • If you want to play audio from YouTube though, or don't want to spend money on a program such as Soundpad you can use a program called "VoiceMeeter Banana".

  I will now cover what it does and how to set it up.

Getting Started

VoiceMeeter Banana is a program that pretends to be an actual microphone so that you can feed it audio, and then it can input that audio into other programs such as VRChat acting as your microphone. It also can act as a speaker, so you can hear the audio yourself.

To do this it installs a microphone and speaker driver on your computer.

1. To start off, you need to download and then install the program from here.

2. Once downloaded, run the program and click "Install". After that you must restart your computer, otherwise things will break.

3. After restarting you may have some audio issues. (Not being able to hear people on VRChat etc..) you can resolve those issues by forcing programs to use your regular speakers with Audio Router.

4. Next search for "Sound" in your Windows search and open it. Here you can see all of the various audio devices in your system. Ensure your regular speakers/microphone are set as the defaults.

5. Go to the "Recording" tab and find the "Cable Output" device. Right click it and select "Properties".

6. In the "Listen" tab, select "Listen to this device". Now you will be able to hear the audio you play.

7. In order to play audio, you need a program that can feed audio directly into a microphone of your choice.

• On Chrome you can use an extension called AudioPick to play audio from a specific tab into the microphone.

• For local files, or YouTube audio when you don't want to use Chrome, you can use VLC - more details below.

8. In VRChat, just set your microphone to the Cable Output while you are playing the audio, and that's it!

Using VLC to play local files and YouTube.

1. Start by downloading VLC. If you plan to use this for YouTube you may want to download the 2.0 version due to bugs with later versions.

2. In VLC go to preferences (CTRL + P) and in the "Audio" tab change your output model to "WaveOut" and device to "VoiceMeeter Input (VB-Audio Vir ($1,$64)".

3. Now when you play any audio files in VLC, it will play them into the microphone.

4. To play YouTube videos, go into "Media" > "Open Network Stream" (CTRL + N), then insert a YouTube URL.

• If this does not work, try another few videos. Some videos may only work on VLC version 2.0 or earlier. (Or so I have heard)

  • If it still does not work, try ensuring that your Anti-Virus or firewall is not blocking VLC.

Disable your Anti-Virus to check, and search in Windows "Allow an app through Windows Firewall".

Ensure it is set to be allowed through, and if you cannot find it in the list you can search for the .exe file in your program files and add it.

Additional Notes

You can also use VoiceMeeter to input audio into other programs, such as Skype, Teamspeak and Discord. Just go into those programs and select the "Cable Output" as the microphone. Or set it as the default microphone in your "Sounds" control panel.

You can also use VoiceMeeter to help with voice changer programs, and use your regular microphone while playing audio through VoieMeeter.

Be sure to look up more guides on those, and guides on how to get your audio leveled out so it sounds good and at the same volume as your voice.

(Feel free to drop a comment with guides you found, or if you have details I should add to this one.)

it doesn't work, it doesn't play in vrchat

Great guide.

At least have a link to CABLE output, which comes from this program.

Voicemeeter (Banana/Non-banana) doesn't include this specific program and this tutorial seems to fail to mention that.

At least have a link to CABLE output, which comes from this program.

Voicemeeter (Banana/Non-banana) doesn't include this specific program and this tutorial seems to fail to mention that.

@CyanoTex The last time I used this thing was 3 years ago, so maybe things changed or I forgot to add it. Anyways I really don't remember much about this at all, so if you'd like to suggest exactly how I should add that link and how to phrase it, I'd be happy to edit this into the guide.

For all I know half of this guide is outdated and doesn't work/VRChat changed and it's no longer needed.

At least have a link to CABLE output, which comes from this program.
Voicemeeter (Banana/Non-banana) doesn't include this specific program and this tutorial seems to fail to mention that.

@CyanoTex The last time I used this thing was 3 years ago, so maybe things changed or I forgot to add it. Anyways I really don't remember much about this at all, so if you'd like to suggest exactly how I should add that link and how to phrase it, I'd be happy to edit this into the guide.

For all I know half of this guide is outdated and doesn't work/VRChat changed and it's no longer needed.

For me, the CABLE output program works because I can't have Voicemeeter working, as it'll hog my headphones and I can't hear VRChat or other programs.

Using Windows 10's advanced sound options, which allows me to redirect Spotify to CABLE Output, I can still listen to VRChat. While I can hear Spotify by telling Windows to listen to the device, it's relatively quiet on VRChat according to the microphone activity.

VLC isn't playing YouTube links. I'm guessing this is because YouTube changed how their stuff works so Discord bots won't work. I'm running VLC 3.0.18

VLC isn't playing YouTube links. I'm guessing this is because YouTube changed how their stuff works so Discord bots won't work. I'm running VLC 3.0.18

You need to use "yt-dlp" nowadays for YT downloads. Discord bots can still do it they just choose not to, avoiding a message from Google.