Have you ever wished you could play your iTunes music directly to Discord during an audio session, having full control of your music and mic volume? I had, I really needed this badly. Keep in mind this guide is for Mac users.

I needed to play my iTunes playlists while roleplaying with my friends using Discord, but I didn’t know how to do it: there are a Spotify integration and various Spotify bots but nothing more. So I had to come up with a brand new solution. I usually roleplay as a Game Master and atmosphere music an essential part of my roleplay routine. You see, I have a playlist for every possible fiction situation, from normal fantasy scenes to sci-fi adrenaline packed fights!

So, if you need to stream iTunes Music to Discord together with your mic input, here’s the guide for you.

What you’ll need

We’ll need some extra software for Mac.

• Soundflower, free
• Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba, trial, and paid version, but free download.

Audio Hijack in Trial mode will work well for some minutes, then it will add noise to your audio. You’ll have to buy the full version to have a fully functional, noiseless app but I really recommend doing so: I didn’t find any other free app able to do what Audio Hijack can!

Step-by-step Summary

1. Download and Install Soundflower and Audio Hijack;
2. Launch iTunes and Audio Hijack and create a new empty session;
3. Add a Ducking Station then connect to it the Microphone as Input Device and iTunes as input Application;
4. If you want, you can add a Denoise and Volume Control to the Input Device and Volume control to input Application;
5. In the Ducking Station, be sure to configure the volume threshold for your microphone and, if you wish, configure the Ducked Volume for iTunes (this option will make the iTunes volume lower when you’re talking on the microphone);
6. Connect the Ducking Station to Soundflower as Output Device;
7. Add a separate iTunes input Application to the session and connect it to the output device you’ll be using with Discord (for example, your headphones);
8. Run the Hijack Session pressing the circular button on the bottom-left corner of the app’s window;
9. Start Playing Music with iTunes and test if everything’s working fine recording sample audio with QuickTime Player: choose Soundflower as input for QuickTime and regulate volume according to your preferences;
10. Launch Discord and set Soundflower as the input device instead of your microphone from Preferences -> Voice Settings;
11. Deactivate Input Sensitivity in Discord;
12. Start your Discord Voice Chat session and have fun! Now you can talk with nice background music chosen directly from iTunes 🙂

Here’s a pre-configured Audio Hijack Session, if you prefer you can download and launch it directly! With this, you can avoid steps from 3 to 7. Keep in mind that you might need to re-configure the Input Device, Output Device and volume threshold for your microphone.

Discord + iTunes + Microphone Setup

First, install both Soundflower and Audio Hijack.

Soundflower is a MacOS system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. It generates two virtual audio devices you can control from System Preferences on your Mac: Soundflower (2ch) and Soundflower (64ch). You’ll find these virtual devices both in audio input and audio output.

Soundflower alone is a very handy piece of software since it can help you record any audio you can hear from your system. For example, it’s super useful to record the audio from a game you are playing: you set the output device to Soundflower, open Quicktime Player and start an Audio Recording session choosing Soundflower as the input device and there you go!

We’ll use Soundflower as an input audio device for Discord! This way, though, Discord would just stream the system music, not your mic too!

In Audio Hijack, create a new empty session. You can connect your audio sources to the input of a Ducking block, then output from there to your Soundflower virtual device to pass that audio to Discord. Here is an example of such a setup:

In this example, we get audio from the Mic, denoise it, enhance volume and feed it into the Ducking block. Then we get the audio from iTunes, lower the volume and feed it to the Ducking block too. In the Ducking block, the upper audio input can be set-up with a Threshold and with the Ducking Volume control, you can also have your music be automatically lowered while you’re speaking if you want! You’ll have to play with these levels a bit until you’re satisfied with the result.

This is very useful because we’ll use the Audio Hijack Overlay Threshold to control our Microphone’s noise and threshold and/or the Music Ducked Volume level. We cannot use the built-in Discord feature for this since if we kept it active, we’d hear music only while speaking with our mic.

We’ll connect the Ducking Block to the Soundflower virtual Output Device. We’ll use this device in Discord instead of the Mic, as an audio input. I also recommend you to add a separate iTunes application to the Output device in Audio Hijack, as shown in the above screenshot: choose the output device of your choice, I chose Headphones, for example. If you don’t, you won’t hear your own iTunes Music while playing, since it will be routed to Soundflower only.

Also, don’t forget to press the circular button on the bottom-left corner of the Audio Hijack app to start your session.

Test the results with Quicktime Player (or any other audio recorder)

Now we’re ready to check it out! Open Quicktime Player and start a brand new audio recording session.

Choose Soundflower as your input device and be sure to set the volume level to your liking. Start playing music, speak in the microphone and start recording with Quicktime. Checking the Quicktime recording, you’ll be able to play with music VS mic volume until you’re satisfied with the result. Also, this is a nice way to check the Ducking Block’s volume threshold setup for your microphone!

Finally, stream iTunes and mic to Discord

We can finally start Discord! Go to Preferences, Voice and Video. You’ll see the Input and Output Device options here: set the input device to Soundflower and keep the output to Default.

You’ll need to deactivate the “Automatically determine input sensitivity” feature and set the threshold to a minimum. That’s because we’ll regulate the mic’s input threshold using Audio Hijack instead 🙂

Save your settings and you should be ready to go! Play any music you like with iTunes and talk to your friends normally. Of course, you can input music or sound from any other app too! And you can even input sound from multiple apps at the same time, with Audio Hijack. Have fun, comment if you need help and please share this article on your favourite social medias 🙂