How to play sounds through your mic in Discord

Discord's built-in soundboard only takes short clips, and you need Nitro to use your own sounds in other servers. A soundboard app on your PC has neither limit: any file, any length, played straight into voice chat as if it came from your mic.

⬇ Download Onion Board (free)

Windows 10 and 11 · no account, no ads, anonymous usage count you can switch off

How it works

Discord can only listen to one microphone. So Onion Board puts your sounds straight into your real mic: one click in the app (Windows asks for permission once), and everything that listens to your mic, Discord and your games included, hears your voice and your sounds together. There's no extra mic to pick and no virtual cable to install.

Rather use a virtual cable (a free audio driver that shows up as an extra mic called CABLE Output)? Click Use the virtual cable instead on the Setup tab and Onion Board sets it up for you; then pick CABLE Output as your mic in Discord. Or pick another device under Send my sounds to (Voicemeeter, a mixer, a capture card, a second sound card) and send the sounds there instead.

Setup, step by step

Download OnionBoardSetup.exe and run it.
Onion Board opens with a short guide. Pick the mic you talk into and the headphones you listen on, then click Put my sounds straight into my mic and Yes when Windows asks.
In Discord, open User Settings → Voice & Video. Keep Input Device on your normal mic.
In the same place, set Input Profile to Custom, Noise Suppression to None, and turn Echo Cancellation off. Otherwise Discord treats music and sound effects as background noise and cuts them out. Don't pick Studio: on your mic it makes Discord skip Onion Board, so none of your sounds get through (on the virtual cable, Studio is fine). Also switch off Automatically determine input sensitivity and Advanced Voice Activity, or use push-to-talk. Onion Board reads these settings and shows a bar when one is in the way.
Drag sound files onto the Onion Board window and double-click a pad. Everyone in the call hears it.

Play sounds while you're in a game

Right-click a pad and give it a hotkey. Hotkeys work even while a fullscreen game has focus, so you can fire a sound without tabbing out. There's also a small in-game overlay: press its key and a panel of pads appears over your game.

The same setup works in any game with voice chat: your sounds are already in your mic, so the game hears them too. (On the virtual cable, set the game's microphone to CABLE Output.)

Where to get sounds

Drag in any audio file: mp3, wav, ogg, flac, m4a. Video files work too; Onion Board pulls the audio out.
Type a name into Search sounds to find it on YouTube or SoundCloud and add it as a pad.
Paste a link from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X or Reddit and add its audio.

Common problems

Friends hear nothing: check the pill at the top of Onion Board has a tick (✓), not a warning sign, and that Discord's Input Device is the same mic you picked in Onion Board. (On the virtual cable it must be CABLE Output; with another device, the mic that device feeds. Nobody sends nothing to others.)
Sounds cut in and out: set Noise Suppression to None and switch off automatic input sensitivity. Onion Board's Fix Discord bar and its Setup tab say which Discord setting is chopping your sounds.
They hear sounds but not your voice: tick Others hear it in the My mic section at the bottom of the window.
Only want the sounds, not your voice? Untick that same box.

Windows may warn about the download because the installer isn't code-signed (that costs hundreds a year). Click More info → Run anyway. The full source is on GitHub.

Also in Onion Board

A live voice changer, text-to-speech in 33 languages, optional AI voices, instant replay of the last 30 seconds of a call, MIDI pad support, and screen triggers that play a sound when something shows up in your game. See everything it does →