Windows fake mic

Question

I have a Windows Desktop Application written in c# and WPF. It does some recording and testing with a regular mic is cumbersome since I need to talk to the mic.

It would be awesome to be able to have a fake mic of sorts that showed up in the Recording Devices settings in Windows that would just playback a wavefile. Some might call it a mic emulator, mic simulator, or a mock mic.

If I listen to this fake mic I would hear the wave file. Hope this make sense.

I tried to goolge around and found nothing. There seems to be some Microsoft example code to achieve this, but no programs ready to install.

Are you aware of any such fake mic?

Solution

Such a fake mic exists, and you don't even need code to use it. It's called Stereo Mix, but it may not be available on all sound cards. It works like this:

In the recording devices category, you have two devices: the microphone, and stereo mix.

• When the microphone is the default, if you try to record something you will get sound from the microphone.
• When stereo mix is the default, if you try to record something, you will get the sound that is currently playing on your computer

So, for you to get the desired effect, you would need to set Stereo Mix as the default, and play some music on your computer. The audio is passed internally, and when recording you will get exactly what is playing on your computer. It doesn't make any difference if you speak into the mic, cover it up, or unplug it altogether. You're not even using the mic, you're using stereo mix.

On my laptop, I can enable Stereo Mix from the VIA control panel (the driver for my sound card), or by using the Sound icon in Control Panel.

EDIT: you may need to enable "Show hidden devices" in the Sound applet in Control Panel in order for it to show up (like here)

Comments

[vidstige]

Thanks, this is a nice workaround. But I would rather have an application that just plays a sound. The reason is that I want to have another sound on the speakers.

[JustAMartin]

The problem is that some programs stubbornly ignore all input devices which do not present themselves as being microphones. One such app is LiveMetting. There seems to be no way to make it use "Line In" or "Stereo Mix" as audio input.