Upping My Stream Audio Game – My Current Setup

Audio on a stream is really important, probably more important than the video! So I’ve really been concentrating on making it the best it can be but sticking to my tight budget. I recently upgraded my microphone to the Neewer NW-700 condenser mic which is a great for the price and sounds good using the filters built into OBS Studio.

I feel adding streambeats music to my stream really upped the quality of my stream for the viewers, and once I made affiliate and added lots of other sound sources, including sounds the viewers can control but with more sources it’s getting a little unruly to control.

My Current Setup

I don’t use global audio sources on OBS Studio, as I don’t want my microphone active during my starting soon or BRB scenes, or my music over the starting soon highlight reel so each scene had all the audio sources pulled in manually.

BS = Browser Source
SS = All System Sounds
HD1/HD2= HDMI Output
EV = Embedded Video

This took a little bit of work to set up initially but works pretty well.

The Niggles With My Current Setup

My current setup requires a bit of setting up before each stream as I want to be able to listen to Amazon Music while I work during the day I have to manually set it’s audio output to a muted monitor, then restart OBS, I would have had to do the same for the game sounds, however I just used the default audio device for ease, which means notification sounds and beeps being fed through to the stream which can be annoying. Also for some reason if I plug my headphones in while OBS is open it requires a restart to kick the sounds from the stream deck soundboard to the headphones instead of my speakers which would create feedback as it is picked up by the mic!

The Mic setup is also specific to OBS so if used in any other program it sounds flat and noisy.

What My Current Setup Just Can’t Do

I have two big issues with my setup which really bugs me;

To control the music and game volumes I need to tab out of the game to move the sliders on OBS Studio, setting the volumes manually I had to remember roughly where the sliders were supposed to be to get the best result, because this is too much to do on the fly while live, I’ve resorted to finding levels that were ok for all scenes, but essentially not the best for any.

The second issue I have is I want to quickly an easily mute things from my headphones but not for the viewers, for example if I’m listening out for footsteps in the game I may want to mute the music, but don’t want to mute it for the viewers or maybe I want to listen to a voice chat from discord but don’t want the viewers to hear. The only way to do this in OBS Studio is to go into the advanced audio settings, which isn’t quick at all, my work around has been a hard mute button on my stream deck for the music, which cuts the music from headphones and stream which isn’t as professional..

Next Step?

After hunting for plugins that will make things easier and not finding anything suitable, and failing to duplicate audio sources with different volume levels I think the next step is to find an external mixer to take some of the work away from OBS Studio.