Game audio, voice chat, music, alerts, and your microphone all compete for space, and your audience hears whatever balance happens to land.
Wave Link 3.0 lets you separate every audio source, route them into independent mixes, and send exactly the right balance to your stream, your headphones, or your VOD recording. It's free, it works with any microphone, and it's designed around the way streaming actually works.
Without a mixing tool, your stream captures whatever you hear. If you crank up Discord to hear your squad, your stream gets louder Discord too. If you lower game audio so you can focus on callouts, your audience loses that immersion.
Wave Link 3.0 lets you create up to five independent mixes, each with its own volume levels for every source. Set up one mix for your stream where your voice is front and center, and another for your headphones where Discord is louder and music sits in the background. Each mix is fully independent, so adjusting one never affects the other.
Wave Link 3.0 supports VST3 plugins on Windows and AU plugins on macOS, applied directly to any input channel. Add compression to even out your vocal dynamics, EQ to shape your tone, or other effects to fine-tune how you sound. Any effects you apply carry through to your Wave Link mixes, so your stream and recordings get the polished version of your voice automatically.
Elgato Marketplace has a growing library of audio effects you can browse and install, or you can bring your own third-party plugins.
If you're using Wave:3 MK.2, Wave XLR MK.2, XLR Dock MK.2, or Wave XLR Pro, VST Insert takes this further by injecting your processed audio back into the hardware signal chain, so your fully processed voice shows up in every application on your system without extra routing.
A typical streaming setup has a lot of audio sources running at once. Wave Link 3.0 lets you stack multiple applications into a single channel. Group all your communication apps into one channel, music sources into another, and system sounds into a third.
Instead of hunting for a specific app's volume slider mid-stream, you can mute "all comms" or "all music" with a single action.
If you stream with background music, you already know the headache: music that's fine for a live broadcast can cause problems when that stream becomes a VOD.
Dedicate one of your five mixes to VOD recording. Route your microphone, game audio, and alerts into that mix, but leave music out entirely. In OBS, assign this mix to a separate audio track, and your recordings are clean from the start. No post-production workarounds.
Wave Link 3.0 uses a horizontal routing matrix. Sources on the left, mixes across the top. You can see exactly where every signal is going and how loud it is in each mix, all in one view. When you need to make changes quickly during a live broadcast, that clarity matters.
Wave Link 3.0 works with any microphone or audio interface your computer recognizes. If you pair it with an Elgato Wave microphone, you unlock deeper integration like onboard DSP effects, Clipguard 2.0 protection, and VST Insert. But none of that is required to get the full mixing and routing experience.
Free on Windows and macOS. No trials, no subscriptions, no feature gates.
If you have a Stream Deck, the redesigned Wave Link plugin turns it into a hands-on mixing surface. Adjust volume, mute channels, toggle effects, and switch mixes from physical keys and dials without leaving your game. On Stream Deck + or Stream Deck + XL, the dials give you smooth volume control that feels closer to a physical mixer than a software slider.
Our Wave Link plugin is available for free on Elgato Marketplace.
Download Wave Link 3.0 from elgato.com and try routing your stream audio into separate mixes. Even a basic setup with a stream mix and a headphone mix makes a noticeable difference.
For a full walkthrough of the interface, check out the Wave Link 3.0 software overview.