Why music on the broadcast costs you
Nobody gets in trouble for listening to music while they stream. The trouble starts when the music rides along on the broadcast. Platform copyright systems scan VODs and clips for recognizable tracks, and when they find one the result is some mix of muted sections, deleted clips, demonetization, and strikes against the channel. The frustrating part is that the music was never for your viewers in the first place. It was for you, to stay in the pocket during a six hour session, and it leaked onto the recording only because everything on your PC was funneled into one output.
So the goal is precise: your ears get game, voice chat, and your full music library. The broadcast gets game and mic, and the music never touches it. Not muted, not turned down low, simply never present on the feed your streaming software captures.
The fix is routing, not willpower
Windows by itself pushes everything to one default output, which is why your desktop capture picks up whatever you happen to be playing. A virtual audio mixer changes the shape of the problem. Every source becomes its own strip, every destination has its own routing button on that strip, and a destination receives exactly the sources you route to it. Keeping the music private comes down to which sources are included, not fader tricks. That means the private music mix is not something you maintain during the stream. You build it once, and the broadcast cannot hear the music for the same reason your neighbor cannot: no route exists.
The rest of this guide uses Patchd, a Windows mixer where you choose which sources reach each destination. Patchd is in development, so the steps below describe how the workflow works when it ships; the Windows level workaround near the end is something you can try today.
Step 1: give your music app its own strip
Once Windows' default playback device is Patchd Desktop (Patchd's setup walks you through it), your music app plays into the Desktop strip along with the game and everything else your system plays. As long as it lives there, it goes wherever Desktop goes, and Desktop is exactly what your stream needs. So the first move is separation: pull the music app onto its own strip with a virtual cable, a small piece of software that carries one app's sound into the mixer as its own channel. Point your music app's output at the cable in Windows' per app sound settings, and it leaves the Desktop strip and shows up in Patchd on a strip of its own, with its own volume slider and meter. The walkthrough in how to route audio per app on Windows covers the per app part in detail.
On Patchd's free tier you get your mic plus four virtual cables on top of the fixed Desktop and Communications strips. One cable is exactly what this setup needs: the music app is the thing worth isolating. The others are there if you also want the game or a browser on separate strips.
Step 2: light your headphones, leave every bus dark
Every strip in Patchd carries a row of colored routing pills under two headers: HW for real hardware outputs like your headphones, and BUS for virtual outputs that other apps can treat as a microphone. On the music strip, light the green pill for your headphone output. Do not light any of its BUS pills: every bus is a feed your stream can capture. That is the entire trick. The lit green pill is why you hear your library; the dark bus pills are why your viewers never will.
Notice what this is not: it is not a second volume you have to manage. The Matrix view does give every route its own level, so a bus can hear a source quieter than your headphones do, but here no route to a bus exists at all. There is nothing to ride down when you go live and nothing to forget to mute, because the music was never on the broadcast path to begin with.
Zoom out from that single strip and the whole setup is only this one rule applied to every source at once. Your headphones gather everything you want in your ears; the buses carry only what your viewers should hear, one source each; and because the music is routed to the first and never to a bus, no wire carrying it ever reaches the broadcast.
Step 3: give each source the stream needs its own bus
Now give each source your viewers should hear a bus of its own. A bus in Patchd is a microphone to other apps, so OBS can capture each one separately:
- Under your mic, light Bus 1. Under Desktop, where your game plays, 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.
- Settings > Audio: set Desktop Audio and Mic/Auxiliary Audio to Disabled, so nothing arrives twice.
Your stream now receives your voice and the game, each on its own fader, and structurally cannot contain the music. The whole OBS side is in OBS audio setup.
The same pattern handles private voice chat. Patchd's fixed Communications strip carries your chat apps once Windows' default communication device points at Patchd Communications, and routing it to your headphones while lighting no bus for it keeps a group call in your ears and off the VOD. The stream hearing Discord audio fix is this exact move with a chat flavored problem.
The honest edge: music inside the game
One limit worth being clear about. This technique isolates a separate music app. If the music is coming from inside the game itself, a licensed soundtrack, an in game radio station, a rhythm section in the gameplay, then it is part of the game's own audio and it travels with the game on the Desktop strip. No external router can split a game's music from its gunfire, because the game mixes them together before Windows ever sees the sound. For those titles, use the game's own settings: most games with licensed music offer a streamer mode or a music volume slider precisely because of copyright scans.
What you can do on Windows today
While Patchd is in development, Windows itself offers a rougher version of the split that works right now if you have two output devices. Open Settings, then System, then Sound, then Volume mixer, and set your music app's output device to something your streaming software does not capture, for example USB headphones while your desktop capture follows a different default device. It works, but it is fragile: some apps ignore the per app assignment until restarted, you get no meters and no single view of what goes where, and one wrong default device change puts the music back on the broadcast silently. The mixer approach exists because the stakes here are strikes, not just annoyance.
Where Patchd is today
Patchd is built around the routing this guide leans on: strips for every source, color coded routing pills for every destination, and a free tier that covers this exact setup with your mic, a cable for the music app, three hardware outputs, and six buses. You can try it now in the open beta.