Mic Monitoring in Windows - for Discord etc

Have you ever wanted to hear your own mic in Discord, just like you can in CSGO? You can do this in the Windows settings, since Discord has no such option.

Mic Monitoring in CSGO

In CSGO there is the command voice_loopback which allows you to hear your own mic.

• voice_loopback 1 = ON
  
• voice_loopback 0 = OFF

I think this is great, and I think everyone should be using this. If everyone could hear their own mic, this would significantly improve the quality of the microphone usage in-game because you can hear if you are too quiet or if you're only producing static, and if you hear nothing you'll get a heads up to check if you're hardware muted. There are no negatives to this. Get on the bandwagon.

Mic Monitoring in Discord

To date, there is no setting for this within Discord.

But you can do it in Windows...

Mic Monitoring in Windows 11

There are a few ways to get to the relevant Sound panel.

• Control Panel (Category display), Hardware and Sound, Sound (or, Manage audio devices)
  
• Control Panel (Small icons display), Sound
  
• Right click the speaker icon in the system tray, Sound settings, scroll down to the Advanced panel, More sound settings. You can also search for Sound settings from the start menu.

In the Sound control panel, select the Recording tab, select your device and then click Properties (or double click your device) to open a panel called Microphone settings. Now select the Listen tab, and then check the "Listen to this device" box.



Your mic will now loop back into your sound output device.

I do not advise that you do this with open speakers (e.g built-in laptop speakers) because it will feedback. This will only work effectively listening via a headset.

If you're playing CSGO you'd better be using a headset already anyway...

While this box is checked, the mic will always loop back into the output device. So, you may want a quicker way to access this setting in order to turn it on and off. You need a shortcut.



NOTE: The parts of this guide that relate to the Sound panel apply to all versions of Windows. The parts that relate to the creation of shortcuts are known to work in Windows 10 and 11, but they should also work in Windows 7 and 8 without modification.

If you're using an older version of Windows...what are you doing with your life?

Creating shortcuts to the Sound panel

"That's great, but it's too many clicks" I hear you say, "I want to turn this on and off so I can play other games without my mic looping back to my sound device! How can I do this quickly?"

You can do this by creating a shortcut on your desktop to the Sound panel. There are a few ways to do this.


1) Open Control Panel and set View As to Small icons. Then right click Sound and select Create shortcut. A dialog box will display asking if you want to create the shortcut on the desktop. Click Yes.



2) On the desktop, right click and select New, then select Shortcut. In the dialog box type control mmsys.cpl and click Next. Name the shortcut "Sound Panel" or similar, then click Finish.



3) Using the command control mmsys.cpl you can also create a command line executable. E.g. autohotkey, boot at windows start up, etc. There are simply too many variations on this to outline them all here - Regardless, this is the command you'll need.

Here is one example using a *.bat file I created in notepad.

Other useful sound related shortcuts

You can also create desktop shortcuts to other useful audio settings using the following URIs:

• ms-settings:sound
  
• ms-settings:sound-devices
  
• ms-settings:apps-volume

I think the Volume Mixer is particularly useful.



You can create shortcuts to any setting with a Universal Resource Identifier or URI. Try them yourself:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/launch-settings-app