Keeping music out of your VOD

Here is the setup that makes the whole problem mostly go away: two mixes. One is what you hear. One is what goes out. Music is in the first and not the second.

It sounds like a compromise and it is actually the professional arrangement — every broadcast desk in the world works this way, with a monitor path and a programme path that are not the same signal.

Why one mix is the trap

With a single mix, every decision is a trade. Turn the music up and you risk the VOD; turn it down and the stream loses atmosphere; mute it and you sit in silence for four hours, which is genuinely harder than it sounds when the chat is quiet.

With two mixes there is no trade. You keep the music, your audience keeps the stream, and the recording carries neither the risk nor the mute.

How to build it

The mechanism is the same everywhere: put every sound on its own track or source, then choose which tracks go where.

• Separate the sources. Microphone, game, music, voice chat, alerts. Music in particular must not share a device with your game, which is why "desktop audio" as a single source is the root of most of these problems.
• Route the music out of the stream track or out of the recording track, depending on what you are protecting. Most streaming software supports multiple audio tracks on the recording, so the usual arrangement is: track 1 is everything (for you), track 2 excludes music (for the VOD and clips).
• Keep monitoring on the full mix. You hear it all. That is the point.

On Windows the common route is a virtual audio cable to split applications. On Linux, PipeWire does this natively and Gleem Crossfade is built around exactly this idea — up to eight channels, each with independent monitor and stream faders, so music can be loud in your headphones and quiet or absent for your audience. It is free and open source, and it exists because this problem is otherwise fiddly.

Test it before you trust it

Two minutes, once:

1. Start a local recording with music playing.
2. Stop it, open the file, and listen to the stream track specifically.
3. Confirm you hear yourself and the game, and no music.

Do this again any time you change your audio setup, because the failure is silent — you will not notice the music is in the recording until something tells you, and the thing that tells you is a copyright notice.

Voice chat deserves the same treatment

Separate your friends onto their own track as well. Two reasons:

• Their music is your problem. A friend with Spotify running in the background puts music into your recording that you did not choose and cannot hear as separate.
• Consent. Being able to cut a voice channel out of a VOD is useful when someone says something they would rather not have published.

When you cannot split the audio

Some setups genuinely cannot — a console, a capture card with mixed audio, a phone.

• Play music from a separate device that is not routed into the stream. An old phone and a pair of desk speakers is a completely valid solution.
• Or do not record. Turn off VOD saving on music-heavy streams. The stream still happens; only the artefact goes away.
• Or use licensed music, which is the previous chapter and removes the need for any of this.

What this does not fix

Being honest about the limits:

• Live enforcement still applies. Two mixes protect the recording, not the broadcast.
• Someone else's clip captures what was broadcast, so if music is in the live mix it is in their clip.
• It is not a licence. Playing music you have no right to play, quietly, in a stream nobody records, is still playing music you have no right to play.

What it does do is remove the most common, most automated, most channel-endangering path from "I played a song" to "I have a strike". That is worth an afternoon of setup.

Next: what to do in the first hour when something gets through anyway.