The real problem: one volume doing two jobs
A game is mixed to be loud. Explosions, footsteps, and music are mastered to fill your headphones, while a teammate on a voice call is one compressed voice coming through a headset mic. Play them through the same output at the same level and the outcome is decided before you touch anything: the game wins, the call loses. So you turn the whole thing down to hear your team, and now the footsteps you actually needed are gone too.
The fix is not a better volume level. It is two volume levels: the game on its own channel with its own fader, and your chat apps on a separate channel with a separate fader. Once they are apart, balance stops being a compromise. You set the game where it feels alive, set the call where every word lands, and the two never touch each other again.
What Windows gives you on its own
Windows does ship a per-app volume mixer, and it is worth knowing about: right-click the speaker icon, open the volume mixer, and you can pull one app down relative to the rest. For a quick one-time adjustment it works. The problems show up when you live with it. The mixer is buried behind several clicks, so rebalancing mid-match means alt-tabbing out of the game. There are no meters, so you are setting levels blind. And everything still collapses into the same output, so if you ever record or stream, whatever balance you picked for your ears is the only balance that exists.
A virtual audio mixer solves this the way a hardware mixing desk would: every source gets a channel strip with a fader and a live meter, sitting in one window you can reach instantly. The rest of this guide uses Patchd, a Windows mixer built around exactly this layout, but the idea transfers anywhere: separate the sources, give each its own level.
Step 1: send your calls to the Communications strip
Next to the strips you set up yourself, Patchd's mixer has two fixed strips: Desktop and Communications. Each listens to a device Patchd adds to Windows, and the chip under the strip's name says which: Patchd Desktop and Patchd Communications. Windows keeps a separate setting just for calls, the default communication device. Point it at Patchd Communications and Discord, Zoom, Teams and in-game voice chat land on the Communications strip instead of in with your music. Then light that strip's headphone pill so the call has somewhere to go. Patchd's setup walks you through both steps, and does the same for Desktop with Windows' default playback device.
From then on the call has its own fader, its own meter, and its own mute button. Note what the strip does not have: a device picker. It always listens to Patchd Communications, so the Windows setting and one lit pill are the whole setup. Whatever you do to the game from here on, this strip is untouched.
Step 2: pull the game onto its own strip
The game is the piece that needs separating, because once Patchd Desktop is your default playback device, the game pours into the Desktop strip along with your browser, music, and notification sounds. To give it a fader of its own, carry it into Patchd on a virtual cable, a small piece of software that takes one app's sound and delivers it to the mixer as its own source. Point the game's output at the cable, either in the game's own audio settings or through Windows' per-app output picker, and the cable's strip in Patchd becomes the game's channel. If assigning one app's output is new territory, the walkthrough in how to route audio per app on Windows covers every click.
Now look at the mixer: the game has a fader, the call has a fader, and both meters move independently. That picture is the whole fix.
Step 3: route both strips to your headphones
Separation only matters if both sources still reach your ears. Under each strip's HW header sits a block of colored routing pills, one per hardware output, each reading the name of the device assigned to that output, or a slot name such as HW 2 while none is. Click the headphone pill on the game strip, and on the Communications strip if you did not in Step 1, so both light green. Both sources now arrive at the same headphones, but they arrive at their own levels, because each traveled through its own fader on the way.
Leave the bus pills underneath dark for now; those are Step 5's move. If the idea of sending sources to destinations is fuzzy, what is audio routing explains it in two minutes.
Step 4: set the balance once
Start a match, get your team talking, and set the two faders against each other. Most people land with the game pulled down a handful of dB and the call left high, but the point is that it is your choice, made with both meters in front of you. When a new game is mixed louder or a quiet teammate joins, you nudge one fader and nothing else moves. No alt-tabbing, no in-game audio menu, no asking everyone to speak up.
Step 5: decide what a stream or recording hears
Here is where the separation pays off twice. In Patchd, a bus is a virtual output that other apps see as a microphone, and each strip has a routing pill per bus right under the hardware ones. Each destination carries the sources you route to it: your headphones can carry the game and the call, while each bus carries only the sources whose pills you light. Each of those routes also has a level of its own: in the Matrix view, every lit route is a small fader where the source's row crosses the destination's column, starting at 0 dB, the strip's own level, when you light it. For a stream, give each source its own bus, so your broadcast app receives each one separately:
- Under your mic, light Bus 1. Under the game's strip, light Bus 2.
- In OBS, add one Audio Input Capture per bus: Sources > + > Audio Input Capture, with Patchd Bus 1 as its Device, then again for Patchd Bus 2.
- Decide about the Communications strip: light Bus 3 for it, and add that bus to OBS too, if your viewers should hear the call. Leave it unlit and the call stays in your ears only.
That unlit pill is the entire privacy mechanism, and how to keep chat audio off your stream walks through it in detail. The whole OBS side is in OBS audio setup.
Where this fits in a bigger setup
Game versus voice chat is the sharpest version of a general rule: anything you want to control independently needs its own channel. Music, alerts, and a second chat app all follow the same pattern of cable, strip, fader, route. When you are ready to build the whole thing, including the mic cleanup chain and every source on its own bus for OBS, audio setup for streaming, start to finish continues from exactly this point.
Where Patchd is today
Patchd is built around this workflow: fixed Desktop and Communications strips, per-app separation over virtual cables, one fader and one live meter per strip, and color-coded routing you can read at a glance. It is in open beta now.