OBS Can't Hear Desktop Audio - Fix Guide

Your mic meter bounces. Your Desktop Audio meter is a flat line.

That asymmetry is the entire diagnosis. Your permissions are fine, your OBS install is fine, your audio settings are broadly fine — because your microphone proves all of that works. What's broken is a completely different mechanism, and it fails for its own reasons.

Here's what desktop audio capture actually is, why it breaks, and the source most people don't know exists that sidesteps the whole problem.

First: are you sure it's broken?

Two very different things get described as "OBS can't hear my desktop audio," and half the people reading this have the second one, which isn't a bug at all.

Symptom A — the Desktop Audio meter in the mixer is dead. Nothing moves when you play a video. This is a real problem. Read on.

Symptom B — the meter moves fine, but you don't hear the desktop audio "through OBS."

That is correct behaviour. By default OBS captures desktop audio but does not play it back to you — because you're already hearing it from the application itself. Playing it back again would just double it up (and cause an echo).

If the meter moves, your recording has the audio. Test it: record ten seconds, play the file back. If you can hear it, nothing is wrong and you can stop here.

(If you genuinely want to hear it routed through OBS: ⋮ → Advanced Audio Properties → Audio Monitoring → Monitor and Output. But you almost certainly don't need this.)

The rest of this article is for Symptom A.

How desktop audio capture actually works

Understanding this makes every fix below obvious.

Your microphone is an input device. Capturing it is trivial — OBS asks the OS for the input stream and gets it.

Desktop audio is not an input. It's the output — the mixed signal being sent to your speakers. To record it, OBS has to intercept a stream that's on its way out the door. Windows provides an API for exactly this: WASAPI loopback. OBS attaches to a render endpoint (a specific speaker or headphone device) and takes a copy of everything being played to it.

Two consequences fall out of that, and between them they explain nearly every failure:

1. OBS captures a specific device, not "the computer." If sound is coming out of a device OBS isn't watching, OBS hears nothing — even though you hear everything.
2. macOS has no equivalent API. CoreAudio simply does not offer system-wide loopback to third-party apps. On a Mac, Desktop Audio doesn't work because it doesn't exist. (See Cause 6.)

Cause 1: Desktop Audio is set to Disabled

The first thing to check, and often the whole story.

Settings → Audio → Global Audio Devices → Desktop Audio.

If it says Disabled, it is capturing nothing. Set it to Default temporarily to confirm the meter comes alive — then immediately go to Cause 2 and pin it properly.

Cause 2: You're listening to a different device than OBS is watching

This is the most common real cause.

You have more than one output device. Almost everyone does: laptop speakers, a headset, a monitor with speakers over HDMI, Bluetooth earbuds. Windows is playing your audio to one of them. OBS's loopback is attached to a different one.

You hear the video. OBS hears silence. Both are working perfectly.

The fix:

1. Play something with sound.
2. Right-click the taskbar speaker icon → Sound settings. Look at which device is actually selected as output — and check the volume bar next to it is moving. That is the device producing sound.
3. In OBS: Settings → Audio → Desktop Audio → select that exact device by name.

Do not leave it on Default. "Default" follows whatever Windows currently considers default, and Windows changes its mind whenever a headset connects, a monitor wakes, or a call starts.

The uncomfortable part: nothing was misconfigured. You heard the audio, OBS heard silence, and both were behaving correctly — you were simply attached to different endpoints. That's the cost of a tool that exposes the real audio graph to you. Cubix Capture captures system audio and mic together with no endpoint to pick, so there is nothing to attach to the wrong thing.

Cause 3: Bluetooth headphones

If your desktop audio plays through a Bluetooth headset, expect trouble — and it's structural, not a misconfiguration.

A Bluetooth headset switches between two profiles: A2DP (high-quality stereo output, mic unavailable) and HFP/Hands-Free (mic works, quality collapses). It cannot do both. The instant any app opens the headset's mic, Windows switches profiles, the device re-enumerates as a different endpoint, and OBS's loopback attachment — which was bound to the old endpoint — is left holding nothing.

The fix: don't capture desktop audio from a Bluetooth device. Either output to wired headphones or speakers, or use Application Audio Capture (below), which is bound to a process rather than an endpoint and is therefore immune to the whole mess.

If this is producing intermittent drops rather than total silence, there's a fuller treatment in OBS desktop audio cuts out.

Cause 4: An app has taken exclusive control

Some applications grab exclusive mode on an audio endpoint for lower latency, which locks OBS's loopback out of it entirely. Discord, Teams, Zoom, some games, and any ASIO software are the usual suspects.

The fix:

1. Windows key + R → mmsys.cpl.
2. Playback tab → right-click your device → Properties → Advanced.
3. Under Exclusive Mode, untick both boxes.
4. Apply, restart OBS.

Cause 5: The better answer — Application Audio Capture

This is the fix most people don't know about, and it's better than everything above.

Since OBS 28, Windows users have a source called Application Audio Capture (BETA). Instead of tapping an audio endpoint, it captures the audio of a specific process — one app, by name.

Why this is strictly better for most recording:

• It's immune to device changes. Bluetooth switching profiles, monitors sleeping, default endpoints shuffling — none of it matters. It's bound to the app, not the hardware.
• You capture only what you want. Record your browser's audio without also recording your Discord notifications, Slack pings, and Windows alert chimes. For tutorials, this is enormous.
• It survives exclusive mode.

How to add it:

1. In Sources, click + → Application Audio Capture (BETA).
2. Name it, click OK.
3. In Window, pick the application you want (your browser, your game, your media player).
4. It appears as its own entry in the Audio Mixer, with its own level meter.

Requirements: Windows 10 build 2004 (May 2020) or later, and OBS 28+. It uses a Windows process-loopback API, so older builds don't have it.

One thing to watch: if you use it, consider muting or removing your global Desktop Audio source, or you'll capture the same sound twice — once from the app, once from the endpoint — which produces a doubled, slightly phasey mix.

For a tutorial recording, this is genuinely the setup you want: your mic, plus Application Audio Capture on the one app you're demoing. Clean, and nothing else can leak in.

Cause 6: You're on a Mac, and Desktop Audio doesn't exist

If you're on macOS and the Desktop Audio device shows Disabled with no other option — that is not a bug and you cannot fix it in Settings.

macOS does not expose a system-audio loopback to third-party applications. There is no device to select. Apple has never shipped one.

Your options are the native macOS Screen Capture source with Capture Audio enabled (macOS 13+), or a virtual audio driver like BlackHole. Both have real caveats, and the full walkthrough is in how to record system audio in OBS on Mac.

The order to work through

1. Is the meter dead, or do you just not hear it in your headphones? If the meter moves, you're fine. Stop.
2. Is Desktop Audio set to Disabled? Turn it on.
3. Which device is actually playing sound? Point OBS at that one, explicitly, by name.
4. Are you on Bluetooth? Stop capturing desktop audio from it.
5. Just use Application Audio Capture instead. It sidesteps 2, 3, and 4 entirely.
6. On a Mac? Different article. It's a different problem.

Why this is harder than it should be

Capturing your own computer's sound feels like it should be one checkbox. It isn't, because OBS is exposing the real shape of the OS underneath: audio endpoints, render devices, loopback attachments, exclusive-mode arbitration, and Bluetooth profile negotiation. Those are all genuinely there, and a live broadcaster mixing four sources across three interfaces needs to see them.

If you're recording a product walkthrough, you needed one checkbox.

Cubix Capture captures system audio and your microphone together, by default, with no endpoint to select and no loopback to attach — and on macOS it handles the system-audio problem for you instead of sending you to install a virtual audio driver.

Related: how to record system audio on Windows · record screen with both mic and system audio