Has it happened to you that you want to play music during meetings through the Zoom app but you can’t? Have you needed one application to listen to another, but Windows doesn’t have an option for it? Don’t worry, in this article we show you how to install, configure and use Virtual Audio Cable step by step.
How does a Virtual Audio Cable work?
A Virtual Audio Cable, or VAC for its acronym in English, is a program or software that acts as if there is a cable between the audio ports of your computer. To understand it, imagine the headphone port and the microphone port. The headphone port makes everything that sounds on the computer sound in the real world.
The microphone port does the opposite, it listens to the real world to record it on the computer. In this sense, the headphone port is the mouth and the microphone port is the ear.
Now imagine there was a cable that connects from the headphone port to the microphone port. That would make the computer listen to itself.
Many of us need such a function, to make two applications on the computer listen to each other, but Windows does not bring that option. Therefore, a VAC is a program that meets that need.
How to install a Virtual Audio Cable?
There are several such programs. Today we will talk about the simplest: VB-Cable. Some programs you can look up later to learn more about the subject are: VoiceMeeter and Virtual Audio Cable. The latter is one of the first to come into being and the one most associated with the term VAC.
We say that VB-Cable is the simplest for several reasons that you will see later. As for its installation, just download it, extract it and double click on each file.
- To download it, just search for VBCable in Google (Make sure you are entering the official site, www.vb-audio.com) and press the corresponding Download button.
- To extract it you will need WinRar or another decompressor that supports ZIP files. There are several files, so extract it into a folder if possible.
- To install it, run VBCABLE_Setup if you have a 32-bit system or VBCABLE_Setup_x64 if your system is 64-bit. That is why it is very important that you know the differences between 32 and 64 Bit processors.
How to configure Virtual Audio Cable?
If you followed the steps above, you may be wondering what happened? There is no program installed and I can’t do anything else. This is normal, since VBCable is not a program, but a Driver package.
If you are not familiar with the term, a Driver is what allows Windows to recognize an external device, such as a horn or a printer. What the installation has just done is create two new drivers on your system: One for input and one for output.
Now you must configure your applications to use the output “device” as a horn, and the input as a microphone. There are two ways to do this, changing the global and individual settings.
Changing the global settings is easier, but doing so you may not hear anything, and furthermore, you don’t want all the apps to interrupt each other, so it’s better to change them individually:
Individual configurations
Teaching you how to configure each application is beyond what this article can do. But you should know that the easiest and fastest thing is to learn to change the input and output method of each application.
Almost all group video calling (Skype, Zoom, Zello) and music and video (VLC, Windows Media Player) applications allow you to change these settings whenever you want. You just have to select CABLE-Input as your output device and CABLE-Output as input device in each application that you want to communicate with the others.
How to use a Virtual Audio Cable?
If you’ve already followed all of the above steps, you’re ready to use your VAC. To do this, simply open the app of the platform that you consider best to listen to music and start playing it, your video call or recording application should already be listening to it. How simple!
There are many things that we leave out in this article, therefore, we always invite you to learn more, you never know when you may need it.