Aura Mixer: Windows Audio Mixer

Overview

Aura Mixer is a real-time audio mixer and audio engine for Windows 10 and 11. It gives every sound on your PC — a microphone, a game, Spotify, a browser tab — its own fader, its own processing chain and its own routing, something Windows still can't do out of the box.

It is built for gamers who want clear positional audio and a separate voice-chat level, streamers who need a stream mix that differs from what they hear, creators who want a polished microphone, and anyone who wants music quietly ducked under a call. One native app takes the place of the usual patchwork of VoiceMeeter, Equalizer APO, Peace and HeSuVi, and it needs no virtual cable drivers to capture a single application.

I designed and built all of it as a solo founder under Net Glow Studios: the Windows app, the real-time engine and the commercial backend.

Quick facts

• What it is: a virtual mixing console for Windows 10 (1809+) and Windows 11, with a Simple and an Advanced view of the same mixer
• Architecture: the UI (AuraMixer.exe) and the real-time audio engine (AuraEngine.exe) run as two separate processes connected by a gRPC contract
• Audio format: fixed 48 kHz / 32-bit float internal pipeline on WASAPI, about 10 ms default latency and as low as 2.7 ms in Exclusive mode
• Processing: 12-band parametric EQ, noise gate, compressor, 15 insert effects, binaural HRTF spatial audio and EBU R128 loudness metering (the effects rack, advanced spatial models and loudness tools are Premium)
• Sources: per-application audio, microphones and line-in, whole-device loopback, audio files, test tones and a soundboard
• Control: global hotkeys, automation rules and a local gRPC Open API
• Licensing: a Free tier plus Premium, activated with a license key; the app needs no account
• Status: public beta at aura-mixer.com

The problem it solves

On a stock Windows PC all audio is glued together. Your game, music, Discord and browser come out of one volume slider, and anything you stream or record captures the whole jumble.

Aura Mixer un-glues it. Every source becomes a channel, and every destination becomes an output bus with its own independent mix. You hear your music while your stream doesn't, your call hears your microphone but not your game, and your headphones get 3D positioning that your speakers never see.

Key features

• Per-app capture with no virtual cables. Put a single application — Spotify, a browser, a game — on its own fader using Windows application loopback (Windows 10 build 20348+ or Windows 11). Microphones, line-in and whole-device loopback work the same way. Premium adds audio-file Player, test-tone Generator and Soundboard channels.
• An independent mix for every destination. Route any channel to any number of output buses, trim each send in dB, and monitor any bus in your headphones to hear exactly what your viewers hear. An application-capture bus lets OBS grab the stream mix directly, and a Recorder bus writes any mix straight to a WAV file.
• A full channel strip on every source. Input gain with PAD and phase invert, a noise gate, a parametric EQ with up to 12 bands, a compressor, fader and pan, plus a rewirable rack of 15 insert effects (Premium): limiter, expander, de-esser, loudness equalization, noise suppressor, reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, pitch shifter and more. Processors that are switched off are removed from the audio graph entirely and cost no CPU.
• HRTF spatial audio on ordinary headphones. Place any source in 3D, or fold 5.1 and 7.1 surround sources down to convincing binaural stereo. The Generic and Enhanced models are free; the measured Immersive model and your own imported .wav or .sofa HRIR are Premium, as is the guided listening test Find my best profile, which picks the measured profile that suits your ears.
• Studio-grade output processing. EQ for headphone and room correction, a safety limiter, output delay for lip-sync, and, with Premium, loudness metering to ITU-R BS.1770 plus automatic normalization to a target LUFS.
• Scenes, presets and the Workshop. Snapshot the whole mixer as a scene — Streaming, Gaming, Work — and recall it in one click. Browse and download presets, multi-stage packs and collections in the built-in Workshop, with a live preview of what each one does before you apply it.
• Simple and Advanced views. Simple is the default: big, friendly sound cards, plain-English controls and a guided Sound setup for your headphones. Advanced opens the full console. It is one mixer underneath, so switching never loses a setting.
• Control from anywhere. Global hotkeys with push-to-talk and push-to-mute, a hardware volume-key redirect, Premium automation rules that duck, mute, record or recall a scene when an app launches or a device connects, and a local gRPC Open API (Premium) for external tools.
• Always on, never in the way. The mixer lives in the system tray, closing the window keeps the audio flowing, and it can start with Windows. An unplugged device is replaced by silence and reconnects automatically when it returns, and the engine restarts itself after sleep.

Architecture: an isolated real-time engine

Aura Mixer is deliberately split along a hard process boundary:

• AuraMixer.exe — the console. A MAUI Blazor Hybrid (WebView2) application that owns the interface, scenes, the Workshop, licensing, updates and the Open API listener. It launches and supervises the engine.
• AuraEngine.exe — the engine. A separate, headless real-time process that hosts WASAPI capture and playback, the DSP graph, HRTF rendering and loudness analysis. Its audio threads run at Windows MMCSS "Pro Audio" priority.

The two talk over a versioned gRPC contract on a local named pipe, so no network port is exposed. Because they are separate processes, the audio path never shares a runtime, a garbage-collected heap or a thread pool with the WebView2 interface, and a fault in the engine cannot take the UI down with it. External tools that use the Open API only ever reach the console, never the engine directly.

The engine reports its own CPU load, buffer overruns and underruns in the status bar, so you can see what the audio path is doing at any moment.

Tech highlights

• Real-time engine in C# on WASAPI, with a purpose-built DSP graph: parametric EQ, dynamics, FFT-based HRTF convolution and ITU-R BS.1770 loudness analysis, running at a fixed 48 kHz / 32-bit float
• gRPC everywhere it matters: the console-to-engine contract and a token-authenticated Open API bound to 127.0.0.1
• ASP.NET Core backend for the licensing portal: Stripe payments, offline-verifiable ES256 machine-bound licenses, auto-update infrastructure and an admin portal
• PostgreSQL and Docker, deployed through a GitLab CI/CD pipeline

Status

Aura Mixer is in public beta and under active development. The Free tier is a complete mixer for everyday and gaming use, and Premium unlocks the effects rack, advanced spatial audio, loudness tools and higher limits. Download it at aura-mixer.com or join the community on Discord.