The Healz Squad

After joining my guild, the Avengers of Azeroth, I noticed that my guildmaster, Jedem, would stream music through Ventrilo for us to listen to. I always wondered how he did this, and when I figured out what I believe to be the most efficient method of doing so, I posted up a guide on the guild forums.

Using this method of streaming music through Vent you can isolate your mic input and the music stream. This allows you to either just stream the music, just talk, or do both. You will also be able to hear your own music but without the Vent delay (so it will be in front of what everyone else hears; that means no singing along ). This guide was written for Windows XP, but Vista users shouldn’t find it much different.

Programs required:

Ventrilo
Winamp
Virtual Audio Cable*

*VAC is not free but you need it to make this work.

Part One: Setting up VAC:

Open the VAC Control Panel. (Start – All Programs – Virtual Audio Cable – Control Panel). You should see this screen (minus the Virtual Audio Cable 2 line):

To make this work you need to add another virtual audio cable. Change the number in the top left corner to 2 and press set. You now should have two running virtual audio cables. You can now close the control panel.

Part Two: Setting up Winamp:

“Why Winamp?” you may be asking. It’s not my favourite media player but it has one extremely useful/required function which not many other media players also have: the ability to output to any audio I/O source. If you use another player that can do this it should also work. If you just lolwuted, don’t worry, Winamp is free and takes next to no time to set up for this.

We need to set Winamp up to output to Virtual Audio Cable 1. To do this, open Winamp:

Go to options and select preferences:

Select ‘Output’ in the left box, click NulSoft DirectSound Output v2.49 (d) [out_ds.dll]:

And change the output to Virtual Audio Cable 1:

Part Three: Setting up the Audio Repeaters:

Open up three Audio Repeaters (Start – All Programs – Virtual Audio Cable – Audio Repeater). You need the Audio Repeaters plus Winamp open whenever you want to stream music.

Set the first Audio Repeater’s wave in to Virtual Audio Cable 1 and the wave out to your output device (speakers or headphones – for me this is Plantronics Headset).

This is what controls you hearing your own music. If you want to hear your own music while streaming, start this Audio Repeater. If you want to not hear your music while streaming, stop this Audio Repeater. You can start and stop whenever you want.

Set the second Audio Repeater’s wave in to Virtual Audio Cable 1 and the wave out to Virtual Audio Cable 2.

This is what controls your music stream. If you want others to hear your music, start this Audio Repeater. If you want others to not hear your music, stop this Audio Repeater. You can start and stop whenever you want.

Set the third Audio Repeater’s wave in to your input device (microphone – for me this is Plantronics Headset) and the wave out to Virtual Audio Cable 2.

This is what controls your voice. If you want others to hear you talking, start this Audio Repeater. If you want others to not hear you talking, stop this Audio Repeater. You can start and stop whenever you want. You can talk and stream at the same time.

Part Four: Setting up Ventrilo

Open Ventrilo and go into Setup. Set your input device to Virtual Audio Cable 2.

The other settings shouldn’t matter too much. If you want a continuous music stream without microphone interruption, set the sensitivity to 0, silence time to 0.5 seconds, put push to talk off and stop the third Audio Repeater (Mic –> VAC2).

Finally, connect to a Ventrilo server, right click on the server name (e.g. Avengers of Azeroth), then select Integration – Winamp. The song you are playing will be shown next to your name.