Any way to run SteamVR without the audio being hijacked?

[Kurtino]

When I turn on SteamVR, audio is set to the headset instead of my default speakers or headphones/microphone. I can mirror audio, but mirroring audio takes the volume of VR into account, so if I'm at 50% volume within VR, my speakers are now hit with a 50% lower volume. Additionally mirroring audio causes a noticeable delay to audio, so it's always lagging behind ever so slightly.

Is there a way to isolate audio between the headset and the speakers so they are their own things? Oculus does this fine, where VR games will play audio through the headset always, and always prioritise the microphone from the headset, but using SteamVR all of my games default to my speakers and headset microphone unless I set window's default to the headset, or let SteamVR do it for me.

Ideally I'd like to be able to have SteamVR running without my audio being taken/manipulated, but not have to go through settings to swap audio devices every time I want to put the headset on.

[UK Old Git]

There is a setting in SteamVR to tell it what audio input and output it should use when it starts and what to swap back to when you exit SteamVR. But I'm really not clear on what you are saying. Only way I've ever had my headset working at the same time as my speakers was to have the the head set plugged in with the speakers using a splitter.

[Kurtino]

Originally posted by UK Old Git:

There is a setting in SteamVR to tell it what audio input and output it should use when it starts and what to swap back to when you exit SteamVR. But I'm really not clear on what you are saying. Only way I've ever had my headset working at the same time as my speakers was to have the the head set plugged in with the speakers using a splitter.

Yeah that's the problem, if you tell SteamVR to swap to another audio input/output, you're changing your audio to go through the headset and not your current sound setup. Which means you have to either be exclusively be using either your current sound or the headset for your audio, you can't do both.

If you mirror the audio it's delayed and out of sync, and it's also quieter from SteamVR's audio settings.

For example, on the Oculus Rift, my brother could be playing in VR with the game audio and the Rift's microphone using the Rift. I could be watching youtube/using the computer at the same time with youtube being played through my speakers, and my microphone working separately. Oculus does this by default and automatically isolates sound between VR games and the desktop, but you can overwrite this by mirroring or setting all audio to be one or the other.

I'm asking is there a way for SteamVR to do this, have VR applications use the headset for audio, and desktop applications use the current desktop audio solution unchanged, without having to change audio settings around, or have to turn off SteamVR completely.

[UK Old Git]

I don't think steamVR can do this, I've not seen any options in steamVR to allow anything other then to make the VR mic/headphones the default when it starts and return it back to a different default when it exits.

But having said that I wonder if you could make the VR mic/headphones the default communication device in windows and choose this in the vr audio set up, it definitely shows up in the vr audio set up.
I use Teamspeak a lot and have my mic/headphones set as the default communication device in windows and can use the speakers at the same time and can only hear Teamspeak through the headphones.


You could give that a try I the get feeling it could work.

[Lynnsight]

Did you ever find a solution to this?

I have the same issue with the Valve Index: My wife wants to play Beatsaber while I'd like to play a different game.
I can run both games, but we either hear both each other's audio (mirroring) Or only one of us gets both audio streams.

Needless to say, that's awful.
Oculus works fine, though.

[Kurtino]

Originally posted by Lynnsight:

Did you ever find a solution to this?

I have the same issue with the Valve Index: My wife wants to play Beatsaber while I'd like to play a different game.
I can run both games, but we either hear both each other's audio (mirroring) Or only one of us gets both audio streams.

Needless to say, that's awful.
Oculus works fine, though.

Funny enough I'm looking back at my problem and realise how I could have solved it quite easily. I think the bigger issue I couldn't solve is getting both audio sources to play mirrored without any delay/volume decrease, which I never fixed.

If you want your audio to be separate from Beat Saber and any other game/application, first disable mirroring. SteamVR doesn't do anything special other than set your default audio to the headset, so all you need to do is go into "Sound mixer options" (make sure it says mixer, not Sound settings) in windows 10 and then change the audio from the game you want back to your headphones. You may want to also change other things, like System Sounds, so your Wife doesn't hear Windows notifications.

I've just tested this by making chrome play a YouTube video that isn't coming through my Index and it worked, volume stayed the same and there was no delay.