CS2 voice chat and audio problems: the console commands for muting, volume, push-to-talk, and the buffer that causes cra

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Quick summary

• voice_modenable 0 disables your microphone. You can still hear everyone else. voice_modenable 1 turns it back on.
• snd_voipvolume scales how loud other players sound, from 0 to 1.
• cl_mute_enemy_team 1 mutes enemy communication, and cl_mute_all_but_friends_and_party 1 mutes everyone outside your Steam friends list and party.
• voice_vox 1 switches to always-on voice, so you do not have to hold a push-to-talk key.
• voice_threshold sets the level your microphone has to reach before it transmits when you use voice activation.
• snd_mixahead is the audio buffer in seconds. Lower is less latency and more chance of crackling.
• voice_loopback 1 plays your own microphone back through your speakers, which is the quickest way to check a mic without a teammate.

Turn voice on or off

voice_modenable is the master switch. Set it to 0 and your microphone stops transmitting while you keep hearing the rest of the team. Set it to 1 to re-enable it. This is the command to check first when a teammate says they cannot hear you, because it is easy to toggle it by accident with a bind.

Voice volume

snd_voipvolume controls the volume of other players' voices relative to everything else in the game. The value range is 0 to 1, where 1 is full volume and 0.5 is half. If voices sound buried under gunfire, raise it. If they drown out footsteps, lower it.

Muting specific people

• cl_mute_enemy_team 1 mutes all enemy players. Set it to 0 to unmute them.
• cl_mute_all_but_friends_and_party 1 mutes everyone who is not on your Steam friends list and not in your party. Set it to 0 to hear everyone again.

Both are on the command list TotalCS publishes for CS2 voice, and both default to off.

Push to talk or voice activation

• voice_vox 1 enables VOX, meaning voice chat is always on and you do not need a push-to-talk key. Set it to 0 to go back to key-based transmission.
• voice_threshold sets the volume your microphone has to exceed before it transmits when you are on voice activation. A higher value needs louder speech, a lower value picks up quieter speech and more background noise.
• voice_threshold_delay sets how many seconds the game waits while you are silent before it assumes you stopped talking.
• voice_threshold_hold sets how many seconds the system keeps treating you as talking after your voice drops below the threshold. It exists to stop your speech from being cut off mid-sentence.

If your teammates say you cut out at the end of sentences, raise voice_threshold_hold. If they say you transmit keyboard and fan noise, raise voice_threshold.

Check your own microphone

voice_loopback 1 makes your microphone play back through your speakers so you can hear what you sound like. The command list notes there is usually a small delay, which is expected. Set it to 0 when you are done.

Sound effects, voice lines and the audio buffer

• snd_gamevolume controls in-game sound effects.
• snd_gamevoicevolume controls character voice lines, on a 0 to 1 scale.
• snd_mixahead is the audio buffer in seconds. Lower values mean less latency and a higher risk of crackling. It is a float, so decimals are allowed.

Crackling or popping audio is the case where snd_mixahead is worth changing. Raising it gives the game more buffer to work with and trades a little latency for cleaner output. vora.tools describes it as "lower is less latency and more risk of crackling", and the setting can be put on its own line in an autoexec.cfg so it applies on every launch.

Making the settings stick

Commands typed into the console apply immediately but are not guaranteed to survive a restart on their own. Putting them on their own lines in an autoexec.cfg file makes them run every time the game launches. The same applies to the voice commands above.

Before blaming the game

Work through the local causes first. Check that Windows is recording from the device you expect, that the input level is not muted at the operating system level, and that the Steam voice settings are not set to a device you are not using. A misconfigured default recording device produces the same symptoms as a broken in-game voice command.

Sources
TotalCS: CS2 voice console commands
snd_mixahead, CS2 console command
snd_gamevoicevolume, CS2 console command