The weirdest technical problem I’ve ever had.
This isn’t an informative post. It’s not my usual stuff about harassment or culture or diversity. It’s about my fucking computer. I have to share the weird ass stuff I had to do to get sound working in Windows 10 with Overwatch, because the usual people I play with aren’t technical and just can’t appreciate the creative lengths I had to go to just to use voice chat.
I used to use wireless headphones, the logitech G930’s. I’d been using them for a few years, but the batteries were starting to fail, and I was having random disconnects mid-match, which isn’t great. It was time to buy new headphones, so I decided to go with the Razer Kraken Chroma.
Part of my reason for choosing those headphones is because I’m already using Razer products. I’ve got the Razer Blackwidow Chroma TE (10 key is garbage) and the Razer Chroma Naga. It’s silly, but I like to configure the color of the lights, and the headphones matched. I was even considering getting their Chroma mousepad, which has side lights that can be programmed as well. All of the configuration is done via the Razer Synapse app, which I hadn’t ever had problems with. Everything with my keyboard and mouse worked perfectly, until I bought this fucking headset.
The Razer Kraken Chroma is USB, so it adds a device to my system. I prefer this, and I usually just configure game sounds to go to the headset while leaving my default system sound device going to my speakers. Unfortunately, Overwatch doesn’t have a way to set the default sound device, except for voice chat. No idea why. It’s still broken. I’ll get to that in a moment. So, as a stopgap, I was just going to change my system default device whenever I was playing Overwatch. This is less than optimal, but I could deal with it. It’s how I was managing things with my G930s.
However, it didn’t work. At first, if I changed my default device, sound didn’t go to any device at all. If I switched the default device back to my speakers, sound in Overwatch worked fine. Every other app could use the headphones. Overwatch would not. After a while, and I’m really not certain what changed, even when I set the default device to my headphones, Overwatch would still send sound to my speakers. If I went to the volume mixer in Windows, it shows a list of apps using sound for each device. Overwatch was definitely trying to use my speakers even when the speakers weren’t my default sound device.
Finally, I figured out how to get sound working in Overwatch.
- Set my headset to the default device
- Start Overwatch
- Switch my default device to speakers
- Switch my default device back to my headset
Alternatively, I could replug the headset (but only into a different USB port???), but it was basically accomplishing the same thing.
This got game sounds working, except for voice chat. Voice chat in Overwatch is weird and even more broken. YOU GUYS. THIS IS SO SPECIAL. Here is how I got voice chat working in Overwatch.
- Set my default communication device to my speakers.
- Create a Stereo Mix to send sound going to my speakers to my headset.
- Configure Overwatch to send voice chat to the default communication device.
It’s important to note that I can’t send game sounds this way — there’s a few hundred ms lag, and in an FPS, that’s a really bad thing given the need for environmental sound (footsteps, etc). It’s less than great for voice chat, but it works.
This is literally the only way to get Overwatch voice chat working on my system right now. I don’t know why. But it gets worse.
This isn’t just some weird Overwatch problem with sound. Adding the headset to my system now results in my keyboard refusing to work if I replug it while the Synapse software is running. I have to close Synapse. If I want my keyboard to work while Synapse is running, I have to reboot my system. Synapse needs to be running, because this headset doesn’t have a mic mute button. I bound a mute mic to my pause/break key on my keyboard, and synapse handles that. (as an aside, i’m a bit curious as to how this works — but not enough to dig into device programming in windows. no thanks.)
I’ve got everything working-ish, but damn. Screenshots for your enjoyment of my predicament.
