Every Way to Hear FACEIT Demo Voice Comms, Compared

Every route to hearing a FACEIT demo's voice ends at the same two console commands. What separates them is how much of the work before those commands you still do yourself, and whether the demo file leaves your computer along the way.

One disclosure first: zeroutil makes two of the options below, the CS2 Voice Comms Calculator and the DemoVoice extension. Both get the same treatment as everything else here, including what they do not do.

The five jobs every route has to cover

Hearing a single player in a demo is not one task. It is five, and any tool you pick is really a decision about which of them it takes off your hands.

The two amber boxes are the ones that fail silently. Pick the Valve demo from your match history and there is no voice in the file, so no command can produce any. Guess the slots from the scoreboard and you get a mask that unmutes the wrong people. The other three steps are tedious but hard to get wrong.

Side by side

Route	Where it runs	Gets the demo from FACEIT	Names each slot	Exports audio
Console commands by hand	Inside CS2	No	No	No
zeroutil calculator	Web page, parsing in your browser	No	Yes, from an uploaded demo	No
CS Demo Manager	Desktop app plus PostgreSQL	Not in-app at present	Per player, by SteamID alias	Yes
csgo-voice-extractor	Command line	No	Not its job	Yes, WAV
Other calculator extensions	Browser popup or Windows app	Not stated	Not stated	One of them, see below
DemoVoice	Browser extension, on your computer	Yes, from the match room	Yes	No

"Not stated" means exactly that. Where a tool's own listing does not say whether it reads the demo, this table does not guess.

Typing the commands yourself

FACEIT's support account gives players three lines to paste when reviewing a demo:¹

tv_listen_voice_indices -1
tv_listen_voice_indices_h -1
tv_relaytextchat 2

-1 sets every bit, so everyone is audible, and the third line brings text chat back. If all you want is to hear the round, stop here. No install, nothing to trust, and it works on any demo that recorded voice in the first place.

It stops being enough the moment you want some players. The first command is a bitfield over slots 0 to 31, and _h covers slots 32 to 63.² To hear two people you need their slot numbers and the sum of their bits, and nothing in the game tells you who sits where without cycling spec_player through them one at a time. The full guide to FACEIT demo voice walks through that arithmetic if you want to do it by hand.

The zeroutil calculator

The calculator takes over steps 4 and 5. Drop in a .dem, .dem.gz or .dem.zst and the slot table fills with names and teams; tick players and it writes both commands. There is also a manual grid that works offline, if you already know the slots.

The demo is read in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine. The limit is the first half of the job: pasting a FACEIT match link does not fetch the demo automatically right now, so steps 1 to 3 are still yours: find the match, download the .dem.zst from the match page, then drop it in.

CS Demo Manager

This is the heavyweight. CS Demo Manager is a free desktop application under the MIT licence⁷ that installs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and it needs a PostgreSQL database, version 17 or newer, before it will open past its connection screen.³ That setup cost is the whole trade: once it is running you get statistics, heatmaps, round browsing and voice handling in one place.

For voice specifically it gives you console aliases, voice_all, voice_ct, voice_t and voice_STEAMID64, to use while an analysed demo plays.⁵ The team aliases carry a trap its own docs point out: they follow each player's starting side. After halftime, voice_t means the team that is now playing CT. Since version 3.3.0 it can also export players' voices from CS2 demos to audio files,⁶ which nothing browser-based on this list does.

What it cannot currently do is fetch your FACEIT match. Its documentation says FACEIT restricted demo downloads to a private API, that in-app downloads are unavailable with no ETA, and that you should open the match in your browser and click Watch Demo instead.⁴ So step 1 is manual here too.

If you review demos several times a week and want the analysis as well as the voice, the database setup pays for itself. For one match you want to hear tonight, it is a lot of machinery.

csgo-voice-extractor

A different job entirely. This command-line tool, from the same author as CS Demo Manager, does not unmute anything in the game. It writes each player's voice out of the demo into WAV files, either one file per player with the silence cut, one per player at full demo length, or everything merged into one track.⁸ It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Reach for it when the audio has to live outside CS2: a clip for a video, a callout you want to send a teammate, evidence for a report. Its README also carries the warning that applies to every tool here: Valve matchmaking demos contain no voice audio data, so there is nothing to extract from them.⁸

Other calculator extensions and apps

Two others come up in searches, and both are described here only by what their own pages say.

Demo Voice Command Calculator CS2 is a Chrome extension whose listing describes "a popup that is able to calculate the commands to listen to voice comms in CS2 Demo". At the time of writing the listing shows version 1.1, last updated on 27 August 2024.⁹ The listing does not say whether it reads player names from a demo or whether you enter slots yourself.

CS2 SourceTV Demo Voice Calculator is a Windows desktop program that needs the .NET 8 runtime. Its README lists voice extraction and playback among its features, and its author now directs users to a redesigned successor, Small Demo Manager.¹⁰

DemoVoice

DemoVoice is the one built around step 1. It adds a button to a finished FACEIT match room; pressing it downloads that match's demo from FACEIT, unpacks the .zst as it downloads, and reads every player's name, team and slot out of the file inside your browser. Tick the players, copy the commands. A best-of-three gets one button per map.

Because it starts from the match room, it cannot pick the silent Valve demo by mistake, and because the slots come from the file you are about to play, the mask matches that file. On Chrome and Edge you can point it at your csgo folder once, so the demo lands where playdemo looks and step 3 disappears too.

The limits are the flip side of the design. It only works from FACEIT match rooms, so a demo from another league or a file already on disk goes through the calculator instead. It does not export audio; for that, use the extractor or CS Demo Manager. It is free, has no account, and sends the demo nowhere. You can read more about it or install it from the Chrome Web Store or Edge Add-ons.

Which one to use

• You want everyone, once: type the three FACEIT commands. Nothing else is faster.
• You want specific players from a FACEIT match: DemoVoice, since it covers the two steps that go wrong.
• The demo is from another league, or already on your disk: the calculator, upload or manual grid.
• You need the audio as a file: csgo-voice-extractor, or CS Demo Manager if you already run it.
• You analyse demos seriously and often: CS Demo Manager, and accept the database setup.

If the voice is still silent after all of this, the cause is almost never the tool. Why a CS2 demo has no voice goes through the checks in order, starting with whether the server recorded anything at all.