So I recently bought a Switch, but my evenings are mostly spent chatting with my friends on Discord even if we are all playing different games.
I racked my brains as to the best way to be able to chat to people on Discord whilst also listening to Link beat the hell out of some Bokoblins in Breath of the Wild.
What you need
You don’t need a great deal, but full disclaimer this will cost you about £10.
A 3.5mm Aux cable
Any male to male ‘headphone’ cable will work, but I would suggest getting a relatively good one to avoid interference.
You can pick one up pretty cheap on Amazon
A USB to 3.5mm adapter
This is to go into the back of your Switch dock.
You can go direct from the headphone port on your console into your PC, but this can cause some interference and you have to plugin it in everytime!
You can also get these on Amazon for less than £10
The solution
In short, the solution is about running the console through the PC as a line-in and routing that out of your soundcard to play as standard audio.
Step 1: Plug your 3.5mm cable
Take your 3.5mm male to male cable, and plugin it into the headphone port on the back of your PC. This is going to be the pink 3.5mm port.
Step 2: Plug your USB adapter into your dock
In your Switch dock, you should have a USB port between the USB-C and the HDMI. Plug in your adapter and feed it out of the slot in the back.
Step 3: Connect the adapter and the 3.5mm
Take the cable that you just plugged into your PC and connect it to the green port on your USB adapter.
What we’re doing here is taking the audio that’s coming out of the console, and feeding it into the PC as a line-in. Your PC will see it as a microphone.
Step 4: Configure your new ‘device’ under sound settings
On your PC, go to your control panel then go to Hardware and sound > Sound > Manage audio devices.
Click on the ‘Recording’ tab and you should see a new device there.
Right click on this new device and select properties and click on the ‘Listen’ tab.
You then need to check the box ‘Listen to this device’.
Check your speakers or headphones for feedback noises as depending on the quality of the ports/cables you might hear some.
Step 5: Let me know if it work!
We’ve had quite a few views on this post now, and it would be great to hear if you managed to get it working, or if there are any other things you’d like to know how to do. Drop a comment below 🙂
Step 6: Check out some of our content
We are a small team here at Geek Sleep Rinse Repeat and any support is welcome, if you’ve got a spare 5 minutes (once you’ve got your Switch and Discord working of course) please do take some time to go and check out some of our gaming content. We write plenty of reviews and news pieces you might be interested in, here are a few Nintendo ones for you:
Mainlining review on Nintendo Switch
Stardew Valley on Nintendo Switch – Review
Future Grind Nintendo Switch review
That’s it! You should now be able to hear your PC and Switch audio through one headset or speaker.
If you have any problems with this feel free to drop a comment, but I’ve left some potential troubleshooting issues below.
- Check you have your PC speakers/headset turned up
- This may default your ‘default playback device’ to this new one, make sure your active microphone is still set to that or people won’t be able to hear you!
- If you can’t hear anything, try plugin the 3.5mm directly from your PC into the switch and see if that helps.
- It’s likely you’ll hear a small amount of feedback no matter how hard you try, but this method should be quiet enough that you can’t notice it over game sounds.
- If for any reason you are hearing the audio coming in kinda wonky (like quieter parts of the sound have a noticeably worse quality), uncheck audio enhancements. On some devices, that can help, but it really lowers the quality of the switch’s audio.
thank you so much… ive been trying to get it to work for a while and it finally did!
Glad to hear it! I searched around for ages before I finally worked this way out so I figured I’d get it up online
Thankyou for sharing this info!
Happy to help, did it work?
Works for me! thanks a lot!
I cannot see the ‘listen’ tab when I click properties?
It could be an issue with out of date drivers?
Having some trouble here. My PC only has 1 combined mic/headphone port. Any suggestions on what I could buy to help with this?
I know you can get splitters for single ports so you can plug in headphones and a mic. But I’m not sure if this method would then still work.
Nothing is showing up in my Recording tab. Any idea how to fix this? I’ve got a combined mic/headphone port.
Bro you are the best! I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get my switch to come through my 5.1 surround speakers. Everybody I asked said it couldn’t be done, or at least they had no idea on how to do it, and I just so happened to come across this post. Thank you so much and God bless you..
No problem mate, glad to hear it
I don’t see it posted anywhere here, but I’d like to point something out.
If for any reason you are hearing the audio coming in kinda wonky (like quieter parts of the sound have a noticeably worse quality), uncheck audio enhancements. On some devices, that can help, but it really lowers the quality of the switch’s audio.
Other than that, this worked like a charm. Damn well worth the money!
Thanks for this, I’m going to add it into the troubleshooting section if thats OK?
Hey, I have my MSI thing pop up when i Insert it that then asks what i am connecting. Do i select it as a mic? Or as a headphone? Or simply as a line-in?
Technically I think it should be a line-in, providing you can ‘listen’ to it. All this method is doing is creating a loop from your switch to your speakers/headphones. Any issues drop us another reply, and sorry for the delay.
Is there a way to do this while also using the pro controller or will I have to use the headphone jack and plug it directly into my sound card? I am using a good sound card but I am still getting interference is there another way around this?
Hi Aussie,
I’ve not tried it myself, but if it’s taking up the USB slot maybe use a multi-USB port to split it out? Another reader suggested the following if you are still getting feedback:
If for any reason you are hearing the audio coming in kinda wonky (like quieter parts of the sound have a noticeably worse quality), uncheck audio enhancements. On some devices, that can help, but it really lowers the quality of the switch’s audio.
Alternatively you could try using one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L1NP7YI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=roadsun0a-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B01L1NP7YI&linkId=2662f99a2335da20ab3c14499569d54e
I did this and the feed back is almost the same level of the game isnt it supposed to be lower
Never mind I got the static to go away by putting the mic base boost to 0 and setting the volume lower. Then I turned up the switches volume instead.
I don’t know if my last comment stayed because I don’t see it anymore. What I said was basically, you can turn down the static if you lower the settings in your PC, and increase the sound output of your console.
Hi mate, we have comments on an approval basis just to avoid all the bot spam 🙂 that’s a great tip thanks!
I followed all the steps and it works great! However the nintendo switch audio is only playing through my speakers, and not my headset. I even set the playback device for the switch to my headset but it still doesn’t work. Any advice?
If your PC is ‘listening’ to the switch as an input, then it should route all audio out to the primary device. Your PC has no idea that it’s a switch, it’s just been tricked into thinking it’s a microphone.
The only thing I could potentially think of is that your PC default device is your speakers, and Discord has been separately told to go through your headset? (Discord settings override defaults on your PC).
Does any other audio come out your speakers? Such as a youtube video or something like that?