Use your phone as a mic in OBS

Viewers forgive soft video long before they forgive harsh audio. A flagship phone's microphone outperforms most budget USB mics, and Micstream hands its signal to Windows over a 32-bit float, 48 kHz pipeline. OBS sees a normal input device and gives it the full treatment: its own channel, filters, and monitoring.

You need Micstream running first — Windows client, Android app, phone connected. For streaming, connect over USB: latency is ultra-low, and unlike Wi-Fi it can't glitch mid-stream because someone started a download. The setup walkthrough covers the install.

Add the source

1. 1

   Add an Audio Input Capture source

   In the Sources panel, click + and choose it from the list.

2. 2

   Name it

   Something obvious — "Phone mic".

3. 3

   Set the Device to Micstream

   Pick it from the dropdown and click OK. It appears in the Audio Mixer immediately.

If you'd rather have the mic in every scene, set it globally instead: open Settings→Audio→Global Audio Devices and assign Micstream to Mic/Auxiliary Audio.

Set your levels

Talk at your normal volume and watch the meter in the Audio Mixer. Peaks around −12 to −6 dB give you headroom for loud moments without sitting in the noise floor. Set gain at the phone — Micstream follows the device volume — instead of boosting a quiet signal in OBS.

Stereo or mono?

Micstream is stereo on supported devices. For a single voice, mono is usually the right call — it keeps you dead-center for every listener: tick Mono for the source in Advanced Audio Properties. Keep stereo when the phone is capturing a room or an instrument; the spatial image is worth having there.

Filters

Right-click the source and choose Filters. OBS ships everything you need:

• Noise Gate — closes the channel between sentences, so keyboard and room noise vanish. Close threshold just above your room's noise floor, open threshold a few dB higher.
• Compressor — narrows the gap between your quiet and loud moments. 3:1 or 4:1 with the threshold a few dB under your peaks is a sane starting point for voice.
• Limiter — insurance at the end of the chain for sudden shouts.

The phone's signal arrives clean, so resist stacking filters by default — add them for problems you can actually hear.

Monitor what viewers hear

To hear the post-filter signal, open Advanced Audio Properties (the gear in the mixer) and set Audio Monitoring to Monitor and Output. Do this on headphones — on speakers, the monitor feeds straight back into the mic. Set it back to Monitor Off when you're done tuning.

Fix audio/video sync

When lips and voice drift apart, the video is usually the late one — webcams add processing delay that a low-latency mic doesn't. Record a clap locally, measure the gap, and enter it as a positive Sync Offset (in milliseconds) in Advanced Audio Properties to delay the mic to match. Over USB, the mic's own latency is small enough that the offset is effectively just your camera's delay. Over Wi-Fi it varies with the network — re-check before anything important, or use the cable.

Troubleshooting

Chatting on Discord while you stream? The Discord guide covers its voice processing. Still choosing an app? Here's how Micstream compares to AudioRelay and WO Mic.

Not installed yet? Both downloads are free: