Elgato Sound Capture

I've never really took much consideration into sound capture, never felt the need until about 2 weeks ago. 

So I was organizing a PC Co-op Speedrun with a friend over Skype and I couldn't figure out how to only record the game audio and not feature his voice on the recording using the Elgato card. After about an hour on YouTube, I came up with the only decent solution, use Virtual Audio Cable. You basically want to set a cable in Control Panel (Line 1) and use that for what you hear in OBS/XSplit. You then want to set Skype or the equivalent to your headphones. That's the simplest way of recording only your PC audio without commentary from friends that I could find that I felt like I had control over.

I then stumbled upon Sound Capture from Elgato and oh my is it good.

Click to enlarge

In a nutshell, it's basically a way easier to use (and free to everyone) Virtual Audio Cable. It should be self explanatory but I'll quickly explain the program. It runs adjacent to the Game Capture software and controls what you want your stream or recording audio to feature. Want that team audio included? Set up team chat with the tutorials Elgato has kindly laid out. Want music and other audio playing on your recordings? Click the music button. As you can see, you also have control over the volume that these have on your recordings.

The PC gaming button is the best one by far. I'm probably stupid but I couldn't find an elegant solution to output HDMI from my PC so my capture card can get audio while I myself can hear it using my PC headphones (needed it so I can hear Skype conversations etc). The sound capture program makes me feel smart again. I click the PC gaming button and my card can capture PC audio while hearing it on my headphones. It's as easy as that and very smart development by Elgato.

If you want to streamline your audio capture needs, I highly suggest looking into and getting Elgato Sound Capture. It's honestly hard to convey just how absurdly good this software is and how far it is taking console and PC capture. If I was to rate software on a scale of 1-10 on how much it has/will impact the video game capture scene, this would be my verdicts:

1. AmaRecTV - 9/10
2. Elgato Sound Capture - 8/10
3. OBS - 7/10

Yes, I really rate Sound Capture that highly. For a tutorial on each setting and how to set them up, please visit Elgato's page by clicking here.