Discord & Consoles: An Impossible Love Story

Published in

Diciendo

6 min readMay 1, 2020

With hot cross-platform titles such as Fortnite and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a new question emerges: how can we chat with our friends as we play the game when we play on different platforms (e.g. PS4, Xbox, PC)?

Let me walk you through my journey…

Two PlayStation DualShock 4 controllers — Discord and PlayStation are nowhere as close as these two controllers

I have a new vice 🎮

Around a month ago I started playing Warzone with a close group of friends. It quickly went from an average of a 30-minute game per session to 3 hours of incessantly shooting at enemy teams.

The vice came with a challenge 🥊

The game has its own voice chat built-in, but it is subpar, to say the least. I tried turning to Discord for help, but my PlayStation 4 does not have a Discord app available for download (and neither does the Xbox, AFAIK).

It seems like since PlayStation has its own proprietary voice chat for its users, it doesn't make a lot of sense for them to accommodate for competition within their platform. Bummer!

I might have a particular requirement 🧐

I always play on my PS4 with headphones (specifically, my Bose QC35). I just like hearing things up-close, and also this way I do not bother my girlfriend and/or roommate while I play.

A question emerged 🤔

A voice popped in my mind: how could I combine the sound coming from my PS4 controller, and the voice from Discord from my computer, and output it as one on my headphones?

There’s gaps in the market 🕳

You can get an Astro Mixamp Pro to mix a “stream” audio signal and your console sound, but at a $129.99 price tag, that seems excessive for a casual gamer. Astro seems to be catering to professional gamers, and not your day-to-day Warzone player–which seems smart, since probably an average gamer is not as extra as me.

Other than that product, I only found more expensive audio mixers meant for producers, DJs, and musicians in general, ranging from $60-$1k, and with enough knobs to confuse an airplane pilot (exaggeration). I was not going to settle for anything over $60 and with a deeply confusing interface.

Knowledge is my favorite drug 🔎

This challenge kept me going to sleep late for a good week figuring out the until-then-black-magic behind mixers, amplifiers, TRS vs TRRS cables, and 1/4 in vs 3.5 mm jack connectors. You would think a software engineer would know a bit more about electronics, but then again, you’d be surprised!

I even learned how to make a basic mixer for two inputs. It’s way simpler than expected, even with the most basic knowledge about circuits. I ended up not building it, but it feels nice understanding how they work!

Applying knowledge is my second favorite drug 🛠

I had to design a setup that not only would allow two sound inputs mixed into a single output, but also would relay the microphone signal of my headphone cord back into my voice chat.

I searched away, and found what is called a Line Mixer. These come in stereo and mono. I needed a stereo one (that is, one that would mix both left and right signals into a single stereo output). I'd also need mic/sound splitters (i.e. little splitter cables that separate your microphone and stereo sound signals into two different cables), this way, the sound could go through my mixer, and my microphone would bypass that entire system and connect directly to my device running Discord.

Putting on my engineer hat 🎩

I came up with a little wireframe based on my setup:

Legend for wireframe — Here's the legend for the wireframe. Enjoy my beautiful drawings.

Wireframe for the mixer setup — And here’s the wireframe. Easy!

Now, you'll see that my wireframe is simplified to always use 3.5 mm jacks, except for the 2.5 mm one into my Bose QC35, which only allows that size. I did this assuming I could find a line mixer that would take in 3.5 mm jacks–that, however, is very rare.

Dealing with decision paralysis ⚡️

I found three mixers that I decided to try, and I'll talk about each one here:

Moukey 4-Channel Line Mixer: This little mixer is the first one I bought. It takes in 1/4 in jacks, so you also need to buy at least three 3.5 mm to 1/4 in jack adapters to use it–here's a good set I purchased. Now, this little guy had a lot of noise. I liked it because it is cheap, it is powered with a micro USB cable, and it has a master volume knob. However, the loud static noise forced me to return it.

FIFINE 4-Channel Stereo Line Mixer: This one was a lot better in terms of noise! However, it lacked the master volume knob, and it needed its own specific power cord. It also featured 1/4 jack ports, so you'd still need the 1/4 in jack adapters I mentioned above. I was close to keeping this one, until I found something that met my requirements much better.

Little Bear MC5 4-Channel Stereo Mixer: This one was my favorite, and the one I ultimately kept! It's tiny, and has a cool, retro look. There’s more important reasons why I chose it, though:

First, it does not need to be powered. It sounds silly, but I already had enough cables around to start with, and being able to get farther from a power outlet was well appreciated. No power means that the mixer will not amplify the volume, though (in fact, it lowers it a bit, even on the highest volume on the mixer, since the signals still go through resistors). However, the maximum volume for both my Discord chat and Warzone was well above loud for me, and losing 20% of the volume was not a big deal.

Second, its ports are all 3.5 mm. This is great, because it fits my initial wireframe design, where I avoid using 3.5 mm to 1/4 in adapters altogether. One less thing to buy!

Putting the shopping list together 🛍

So all-in-all, I bought all of the following to complete my setup:

Little Bear MC5 4-Channel Stereo Mixer
Two 3.5 mm jack cables
A 1-male to 2-female microphone splitter
A 1-female to 2-male microphone splitter
A 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm cable with a microphone (if you own Bose QC35 headphones or any headphone with a 2.5 mm port)

And the final touch 💥

If you rather not have your laptop next to you all the time while you play games with friends, you can use Discord on your phone, too! Then you’ll just need either a phone with a 3.5 mm jack port, or an adapter for newer phones without the port. For iPhones, you can use this adapter, and for Androids with USB-C ports, this one.

All you do is to take your newly bought adapter, and connect it to the jack that would originally go to your laptop, and then connect it to your phone. Then open up Discord and hit up your buddies!

Playing games with friends shouldn’t be this hard! 😠

Have you dealt with this problem? What have you done about it? Let me know if you have a better solution that I have not thought of.

Comment a picture of your setup if you end up using my approach (or a completely different one!); I’d love to hear more from people trying to accomplish this and the ingenious ways in which each person is solving this issue.

Also, don’t forget to clap this article and share it on social media if you found it useful!