How OBS hears things out of the box
OBS thinks in audio sources. Fresh out of the box it gives you two: Desktop Audio, which captures everything Windows plays through your default output, and Mic/Auxiliary Audio, which captures one input device, normally your microphone. Each shows up as a row in the Audio Mixer dock with a meter and a fader.
If your question is simply how to add a mic to OBS, that is the answer: pick it as the Mic/Auxiliary device in Settings, watch the meter move, done. The limits appear when the stream has more than one thing playing. Desktop Audio is a firehose: game, music, browser, and notification pings arrive fused into one fader, so turning the music down drags the game with it, and a private call is on the broadcast unless you rebuild your whole setup around avoiding it.
The real question: where does the mixing live?
A virtual audio mixer like patchd splits your sound into separate strips and routes them wherever you choose, which gives you three legitimate ways to feed OBS. They differ in one thing only: whether the mixing and processing happen in patchd, in OBS, or are split between them. All three are real setups that real streamers run; pick by taste, not dogma.
Path 1: one bus carries the whole mix
The simplest wiring. In patchd, you build the entire broadcast balance: mic cleaned up on its strip, game and music on theirs, every source you want on stream routed to Bus 1. Then OBS captures exactly one thing.
In OBS, open Settings and go to Audio. Set Mic/Auxiliary Audio to Patchd Bus 1 and set Desktop Audio to Disabled. Disabling it matters: your game and music already arrive inside the bus, so leaving Desktop Audio on would capture a second copy of everything and hand you a subtle doubled-audio problem.
Now OBS holds one fader for a mix you control from patchd, level by level, with live meters. The balance you hear while streaming is the balance you set once, and the stream cannot receive anything you did not route. Simplest to run, easiest to reason about, and the right default for most streams.
Global Audio Devices
Path 2: a bus per source
The control-room wiring. Instead of one finished mix, you give each source its own lane in patchd: mic routed to Bus 1, game to Bus 2, music to Bus 3. In OBS you add an Audio Input Capture source for each bus, so the Audio Mixer dock shows a separate fader per lane. patchd still does the cleanup and the routing; OBS keeps per-source control.
Why bother? Recording. With each lane on its own OBS source, you can assign them to separate recording tracks, and the VOD you edit later has your voice, the game, and the music as independent tracks, so a too-loud game or a copyright-flagged song can be fixed or stripped in post instead of being baked in. The free tier's three buses cover mic, game, and one more lane; Studio's six cover a full board. The cost is more faders to manage in two places, which is exactly what some people want and others hate.
Path 3: capture the patchd inputs directly, filter in OBS
The OBS-native wiring. patchd's inputs are real Windows devices: Patchd Desktop, Patchd Communications, and each Patchd Cable show up in the device lists like any sound card. So OBS can capture them directly, one Audio Input Capture per device, bypassing patchd's mixing for the stream feed entirely. patchd still does the device plumbing and your ear monitoring; OBS owns the levels, and you keep building your chains with OBS filters.
This is the path for people who already live in OBS filters and want the stream mix to be an OBS artifact, not a mixer artifact. Two honest costs: your OBS filter chain only exists inside OBS, so nothing it does reaches your Discord call or your recordings in other apps, and you are back to managing balance inside OBS's dock. If that sentence made you tired, path 1 is yours.
Picking between them
Want the simplest setup with one place to look: path 1. Want separate recording tracks for post-production: path 2. Want your existing OBS filter workflow untouched: path 3. In every path, the one rule that never changes: if a sound reaches OBS through patchd, disable the OBS source that would capture it a second time. Doubled audio from an overlapping capture is the most common OBS audio bug there is, and it is always a routing overlap, never a mystery.
Keep monitoring in your ears, not in OBS
Whatever path you pick, resist OBS's own audio monitoring for everyday listening: it adds delay and another loop to reason about. Your headphones are a patchd hardware output, so monitor through patchd: route what you want to hear to your headphone output, keep the broadcast bus as the stream's private feed, and the two never fight. Your ears get everything, including the music the stream never hears.
Where patchd is today
patchd is in development: the mixer, the buses as Windows devices, and the routing shown here are the launch scope, and the waitlist is the only button today. The OBS side of this guide, sources, global devices, and the double-capture rule, is true right now with any virtual mixer, so nothing you learned here expires. If you want the patchd half the moment it ships, join the waitlist below.