Free Virtual Audio Cable Alternative
Virtual Audio Cable is an important software tool for the Windows rtl-sdr user. It allows an audio data stream to be piped from a software radio program such as SDRSharp, into a decoding program. Unfortunately Virtual Audio Cable is not free, which is not in the cheap spirit of rtl-sdr, and at $25 it costs more than the dongle itself. There is a trial version, but it periodically plays a watermark voice which can break decoding.
A free (donationware) alternative to Virtual Audio Cable that we recently found is VB-Cable. VB-Cable does exactly the same job as Virtual Audio Cable but for free. By donating any amount to the developer, you can unlock two more virtual audio devices, which is useful if you use multiple rtl-sdr dongles on one machine.
Note, one trick to installing VB-Cable is that I found that I had to run the installer in Administrator Mode on a Windows 7 machine to get it to work.
Thanks for providing the program for free, I’m an gospel radio and am using it, thank you!
If I had failures in installation due to administrative privileges, I was able to go to the device manager and use the re-install option by pointing specifically to the .inf file. I didn’t have the registry access errors I had previously. This might help some in certain cases.
Worth noting that it appears to have a max sample rate of 96k. Those wanting to use it to pipe to RDSSPY should note that you need 192k for that to work.
Virtual Audio Cable has max. 192k that can be set. VB Cable has max. 96k that can be set 🙁