Windows lets you assign individual apps to different playback devices, but all your Chrome tabs are treated as a single application. Here’s how to split up your Chrome tabs and play sound from different tabs through different audio devices.

A word of caution: installing Chrome extensions is more dangerous than you’d think, so we generally advise against adding too many of them. However, this one seems okay and is open source to boot. If you’re still cautious, you can manually set it to only work on certain sites, like YouTube, in Chrome’s extension settings.

Installing AudioPick

Click “Add to Chrome” on AudioPick’s download page, and accept the permissions. You’ll have a new icon in the menubar, which brings up the interface:

By default, it’s set to use your system’s main audio output, or more specifically whatever you’ve set Chrome to use in Windows’ per-app sound settings. You can change the current tab to use any other output you have set up in Windows.

AudioPick remembers your selection for each tab. Your selection also won’t affect other tabs. Current tabs keep using whatever you set them to, and new tabs will use the System Default Device.

This works with any device, even virtual ones, which makes this extension useful if you’d like to play music through your speakers while listening to something on your headphones, like game audio.

One bug we’ve found: occasionally, when hotplugging audio devices, the extension can get stuck and mute output. If this happens, just set it back to the System Default Device, and then re-enable your preferred device.

Limit the Extension’s Permissions

As a general rule for all Chrome extensions, you should whitelist specific sites on which this extension can work. That ensures the extension is only running where you need it and provides some protection in case the extension goes bad and starts tracking you.

You can do this in Chrome’s extension settings. Click the menu icon in the top right corner, and select More Tools > Extensions. Scroll down to AudioPick and select “Details.”

You can change the site access permission, and add as many sites as you’d like:

Alternatively, you can set it to “On Click,” which will disable permissions until you click the icon in the menubar.

From watching shows to listening to songs, and every other sort of entertainment these days, we pretty much depend on the internet. When it comes to using the internet for our entertainment, we have to use a web browser that can help us visit the websites that we want. Needless to say, Google Chrome is the browser of choice for most users these days, and even if it is not Google Chrome, it will likely be some other Chromium-based browser or Mozilla Firefox. Now, if you are playing audio on the Chrome browser, it will be played automatically on the default audio output device set in your system.

For example, if you have multiple audio output devices, like a pair of headphones, speakers, and others, and the sound output is set to the speakers in your sound settings, Chrome will also use the same audio output channels for playing the audio. But, it can sometimes be necessary to play the audio stream from the Chrome web browser to a particular audio output device that is not the default audio output device and play the audio stream from other programs on your system-default audio output device. You can do that on most Windows programs if the option is available within the program, but it is not available by default on Chrome. That level of granular control is easily possible on Chrome, and I will discus, how you can do that on Chrome.

So, without any further delay, let’s get started with, how you can set the audio output from your Chrome web browser to a particular audio output device.