What "free" usually means in mixer software
Search for a free audio mixer for Windows and you mostly find two kinds of results: aging freeware that technically works but fights you at every step, and free editions of paid mixers where the routing you actually came for sits behind an upgrade button. Both leave you wondering whether the thing you are learning is the real product or a teaser for it.
A virtual audio mixer only earns its place if it does the whole job: give every sound source its own strip, let you route each source to exactly the destinations you choose, and clean up your mic on the way through. patchd's free tier is designed to do all of that, not a slice of it. One thing to be upfront about before the tour: patchd is in development, so everything below describes what the free tier will include at launch, and the only thing you can do today is join the waitlist.
Your sources: four strips before you configure anything
The board below is the input side of the free mixer, as the app draws it. Two strips are selectable: your microphone, and one virtual cable that pulls any single app, your music player or your game, onto its own strip. Two more are always present with nothing to configure: Desktop carries your system audio, and Communications carries your chat apps. Every strip gets the same anatomy: a fader against a live meter, mute and solo, its own effects rack, and Persona, the voice changer, at the bottom.
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Where sound goes: three outs, three buses
Under every fader sits the block that makes this a mixer instead of a volume panel. The top group is your three hardware outputs: headphones, speakers, whatever you plug in. The bottom group is the three color-coded buses, each a clean virtual mix you assemble source by source.
The rule is inclusion: a source reaches a destination only when you light that pill. Mic and game lit on Bus 1 means the stream hears mic and game. Music lit only on your headphones means the music never reaches the broadcast. There is no second copy to mute and no filter to fight, just a route that exists or does not.
The whole practical rack is free
Click + Add Node on any strip and the full practical palette opens: all 14 free nodes, from AI noise suppression and the noise gate through the compressor, parametric EQ, de-esser, expanders, and limiter. That is the entire mic-cleanup chain this site teaches, free. The 22 creative voice-effect nodes are the Studio half of the same palette, not a replacement for it.
14 nodes carry no badge and are free. the other 22 carry a Studio badge on the card.
Any bus is a microphone
Input device
Here is the trick that ties the whole mixer together: every bus shows up in Windows as its own input device. Open the microphone picker in your streaming, recording, or calling app and Patchd Bus 1 sits in the list next to your real mic. Select it, and that app receives your finished mix, cleaned, balanced, and exactly the sources you routed, instead of a raw device.
That one idea covers most setups on this site: OBS capturing a broadcast bus, a recorder capturing clean desktop audio, a call app receiving your voice blended with any app. patchd routes; your apps just see a very good microphone.
Honest latency, straight from the app
The free tier runs the same engine as the paid one. It locks onto the fastest audio path your device offers, ASIO first and WASAPI Exclusive otherwise, automatically, and reports the result in a read-only master clock readout: about 10.7 ms through the bus at a 512 buffer, lower with smaller ASIO buffers. There is no driver picker and no artificial delay penalty, and that is deliberate: the app locks the fastest path itself and shows you the number it achieved.
What Studio raises
Studio ($39.99 per year) is the same mixer with bigger numbers. It raises the two selectable inputs to five in total, your mic plus four virtual cables, so game, music, browser, and one more app can each hold a permanent strip. It raises the three buses to six in total. Hardware outputs stay at three. On the rack, Studio unlocks the 22 voice-fx nodes on top of the 14 free ones, 36 nodes in all. And in Persona, patchd's voice changer, Studio opens the full voice roster, while free ships with six rotating taster voices.
Notice what is not on that list: routing, buses as microphones, meters, the mic-cleanup chain, and the low-latency engine. Those are the product, and they are free.
What you can build with the free tier on day one
A few concrete setups the free counts cover comfortably. A streaming setup: mic and game on strips, one bus assembled as the broadcast mix, your headphones carrying a private mix that includes the call your viewers never hear, and the bus selected as the microphone in your broadcast software (the OBS walkthrough covers that handoff). A meeting setup: mic cleaned up with a gate, suppression, EQ, and a compressor, routed to a bus your calling app treats as a very good microphone. Or the trick of using any app as your microphone, which needs exactly one cable and one bus.
Where patchd is today
patchd is in development, so there is nothing to download yet, and any page that tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. What you have read here is the launch scope of the free tier, stated plainly so you can decide now whether it fits your setup. If it does, join the waitlist below and we will tell you the moment it is ready.