Is there any way to do the opposite of this original thread ?? ie, i want to mute audio coming from my speaker but recording should have the audio. Thanks.
There's! In fact, I've also looked at this thread in a search for this info, and it has an answer. It's just the instructions aren't clear, and with the lack of screenshots, it's hard to orient yourself in all the settings.
Essentially, you need to prepare these things:
- A separate browser or audio player;
- Open the Volume Mixer in Windows;
- Open the Advanced Properties for the same browser/player in your audio sources in OBS.
A separate app is needed because you can control where the audio goes only for a specific app (e.g., you can't control it for a single tab in the browser, as far as I understand).
Now, that you've prepared it, open your volume mixer: right-click on the sound icon in the bottom right -> click 'Open volume mixer' (it's in Windows 11; in Windows 10 it might be called slightly differently). In the opened menu, there's a list of active apps with options to choose input or output devices. You are interested in the output device-that's where the magic begins.
By default, the output device is the active audio device (which it better be headphones for streaming/recording). But, in my laptop, for instance, there's a built-in audio system; and in the Output Device options, I can manually choose my built-in system as the device for a specific app. Now, because my built-in system is not active (headphones are), the audio from that specific app is not playing in the headphones-and it's not playing from the laptop as well. The sound goes nowhere. But OBS can pick it up.
If you come back to OBS, you can choose that built-in system as an audio source. And, once you choose it as the source in preferences, you will notice that it picks up the volume of what is playing within OBS-even though you don't hear it yourself. I think you need the Monitor On option enabled, so check that too.
And that's kind of it! It's a combination of Windows and OBS settings. I don't know if this setup can be reproduced with any device (for instance, I don't know how it would work if you don't have a built-in audio system on your PC), but that's a general gist of it. Good luck!
