Yet another soundcloud workaround

Howdy, I wanted to share the method I use to overcome the devastating blow that soundcloud gave us. The concept Using voicemeeter you are able to forward your voice together with music through a single output. This in turn leaves your players with a static volume, meaning that you are the one that needs to change the volume if any of the players have different preferences for music. On windows you can set a default playback/recording device and a default communication playback/recording device. The gist is to make it so you can talk and listen to your players as usual through a headset+mic while they hear your music through another channel that they have control over the sound. Here is the setup I did: 1. Tools used -Headset with integrated mic -Discord -Roll20's voice chat -Voicemeeter ( <a href="http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Voicemeeter/" rel="nofollow">http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Voicemeeter/</a> ) and it's tutorial ( <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6rp9lkiFBU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6rp9lkiFBU</a> ) -Softrope ( <a href="http://softrope.net/" rel="nofollow">http://softrope.net/</a> ) for creating a Tabletop Audio Soundpad-like offline environment 2. Setting them up -Follow the voicemeeter tutorial until it tells you to set your default playback device as "Voicemeeter Input". -Follow the tutorial until it tells you about A1 and A2, set A1 as your headphones. (At this point your voicemeeter should be broadcasting your desktop audio and at the same time you can also hear your own desktop audio without problem) -Go to your recording devices and make sure your headset mic is set as default communications device. -Open Discord and use this as your communication tool, have everyone join a voice channel. Set your mic and microphone as your headset. -Have everyone log into the game on Roll20. You as the GM will set "I want to broadcast to others" as voice only and "I want to receive from others" as nothing. Players will do the opposite of those settings. Refresh and your browser will prompt you of your default mic, you set this as "VoiceMeeter output". If you have been using Roll20's voice chat before you will need to change the mic settings for your browser. (Firefox and Chrome lets you do that by clicking on a small camera icon on the left or right side of the URL bar). (At this point everyone should be hearing your desktop sounds while you are able to communicate with them as usual) -Download all your soundcloud tracks that interest you (google "soundcloud downloader", you will get a plethora of results, any of them work) -Open Softrope and organize your tracks in cool buttons that you can click to play and stop on demand locally (this guy does a better job at explaining softrope <a href="https://rpggeek.com/thread/657940/using-softrope-m" rel="nofollow">https://rpggeek.com/thread/657940/using-softrope-m</a>... ) 3. ??? 4. Profit You now have an environment where the players can hear your desktop sounds streamed to them through Roll20's systems while you have your nice little chit chat in Discord. You can use anything to replace Discord, including stuff like Skype and Mumble. And you can switch them around, i.e. you use Discord to stream your sound and Roll20 to talk, whatever works for you. In my opinion this is the best set up if you want players to have control over how much they hear, every player in my game has different "sweet spots" for their background music and letting them have control over it is a huge bonus.

Isn't the sound quality poor if you're streaming it to all of them using your own bandwidth?

Technically you are streaming it to only Roll20/Discord and then it will spread it to all of them. Either way there is nothing you can do to fix low bandwidth. You could use Discord for streaming as it uses mid-way servers to facilitate communication and if you set your channel's location near yourself, you can stream at good quality. My players report a better quality in Roll20 than Discord for streaming music.

We use video through roll20, how would I set this up to stream the music through Discord?

You would want to use Roll20's chat tech as usual, set the "I want to broadcast" and "I want to receive" to both video and voice. Make sure you set the mic on Roll20 as your headset's mic. In Discord have everyone join a voice channel and have everyone mute themselves but you and set the mic on Discord as the "Voicemeter Output". Others can click on your account name in the voice channel on Discord to set how much they want to listen from you, meaning that the players have control on how much music goes to them.

It won't let me select the input channel on discord as voicemeter, only the output channel.

Maybe your Voicemeeter is being used by something else? Try checking your recording devices and make sure that voicemeeter is not set as default or is being used by other programs (including browsers). You may also have done something wrong with the initial setup, try checking the youtube video one more time or re-installing voicemeeter as it might not have installed the drivers properly.