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.
Give every source its own bus
A virtual audio mixer like Patchd splits your sound into separate strips and sends each one wherever you choose. For a stream, send each source to a bus of its own. A bus is a virtual output that Windows lists as a microphone, Patchd Bus 1 to Patchd Bus 6, so OBS can capture each one separately.
The game and the music each need a strip of their own first: pick Patchd Cable 1 on an empty input and use Lasso to pull the game onto it, then do the same for the music on Patchd Cable 2. The walkthrough in how to route audio per app on Windows covers Lasso step by step. Then, in Patchd:
- Under your microphone, light Bus 1.
- Under the game's strip, light Bus 2. Under the music's, light Bus 3.
- To put your friends on stream, light Bus 4 under Communications, the strip your voice chat arrives on. To keep a call private, light no bus for it.
- If the stream should hear the rest of your computer's sound, like your browser, light Bus 5 under Desktop.
- Under every source you want to hear, light your headphones in the HW group.
Add each bus to OBS
In OBS:
- Sources > + > Audio Input Capture. Name it Mic, then set Device to Patchd Bus 1.
- Do the same for Patchd Bus 2 (Game), Patchd Bus 3 (Music), Patchd Bus 4 (Voice chat), and Patchd Bus 5 (Desktop) if you lit it.
- Settings > Audio: set Desktop Audio and Mic/Auxiliary Audio to Disabled.
Why each source gets its own bus
In OBS, every source now has its own fader and mute, so turning the music down never touches the game, and muting your mic never mutes your friends. Filters work per source too: a filter you add to the Game source changes only the game.
It also pays off when you record. In Edit > Advanced Audio Properties, OBS can send each source to its own recording track, so the VOD you edit later has your voice, the game and the music as independent tracks, and a too-loud game or a copyright-flagged song can be fixed or removed in post instead of being baked in. Every plan has six buses, enough for a mic, a game, music, voice chat and more, each on its own.
Cleanup still happens in Patchd. Effects on a strip, like noise suppression on your mic, reach every place that strip goes, your Discord call included, while a filter in OBS reaches only the stream.
Turn off what OBS would capture twice
The one rule that never changes: if a sound reaches OBS through a Patchd bus, turn off every other OBS source that would capture it again. That means Desktop Audio and Mic/Auxiliary Audio, as above, and any other capture of the same game or app you added before. 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
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 buses as the stream's feeds, and the two never fight. Your ears get everything, including the music the stream never hears.
Where Patchd is today
Patchd is in open beta: the mixer, the buses as Windows devices, Lasso and the routing shown here are in it today. The OBS side of this guide, sources, global devices and the double-capture rule, is true with any virtual mixer, so nothing you learned here expires.