OBS Audio Setup in 7 Minutes

[00:00] Let's show you how to split your audio sources. I'm talking your microphone, your game, your Discord, your music, you name it, all for your streaming or recording needs in OBS in under 7 minutes. We're doing this entirely inside OBS.

[00:12] It works with any microphone, any Windows application, you don't need any expensive mixes to supply what everyone else is telling you to buy, and you won't need any over-complicated, confusing, or paywall digital mixes either. It's really important to first explain how audio and audio tracks inside OBS work as a base.

[00:28] If you don't confidently understand the next two minutes or so, you can't use the new feature at all without probably breaking your setup. I'd rather be told my videos are dragged out than break your shit, so let's do that and I'll prep my airfoil for the comments.

[00:42] First, if you look at this ODS, it currently has no audio being captured. If I were to set this up in the most basic way possible, I'd go to settings, audio, add my microphone so my voice is being heard, and add my desktop capture so all the sounds that I hear from my desktop is also recorded and streamed.

[00:57] This works for a beginner, but it does suck because your music, your game, your Discord, everything that you hear through your desktop is being captured in the exact same source. It makes it a pain to control the individual volume or levels, and you can't split them in the edit later.

[01:12] Now, if I go to my advanced audio properties down here in my levels, it shows I have six tracks. Everything should be ticked by default, meaning both my mic and my desktop are going to every single track.

[01:24] So, it's all combined. Now this is fine for track 1 because track 1 by default is what is sent to your stream. If you want your stream to hear something, add it to track 1. You can leave this as default, but if you did want to change the default stream track for whatever reason you go to settings output switch to advanced streaming and you can change it here But now you switched to advanced you would need to fix all your other settings So if you using simple let just stick to simple While we in the settings however if you scroll down a bit you see

[01:50] recording. I want you to make sure all six tracks are ticked. Any track that isn't ticked won't appear in the final recording. If you use advanced put the recording tab and you'll see something very similar very easily. If you can't change the audio track boxes it means your

[02:03] recording format or quality doesn't support multi-track. I recommend using MKV if you know how to remix, or if you don't, use Fragmented MP4. If it still doesn't work after changing that, then you need to change your quality so that it doesn't stay the same as the screen. These two

[02:16] file types that I told you to use are crash proof essentially, so if OBS closes unexpectedly or your PC shuts off randomly, they won't corrupt your footage, it'll just stop where it's at. With that done, we head back to our advanced audio properties and untick everything except of course our screen

[02:31] track, aka track 1, and then we're going to add our mic back in by clicking track 2 and desktop to track 3. Now our microphone is not just going to stream on track 1, but is also isolated in the

[02:44] recording on track 2. And all desktop audio capture, so game and music discord, are going to the stream track 1, and they're isolated in the recording on track 3. Congratulations, you now understand audio tracks in OBS. With that, now let's use the new feature to split literally everything. I'm

[03:02] going to remove everything again and adjust my microphone back, and then I'm going to add a new source, specifically an audio application caption source. I'm going to call this something like Chrome or Music, and then I'm going to click the drop-down and select my Chrome window.

[03:15] As I play my lo-fi, it moves, and if I pause, it stops. Now I can control my stream music or any audio coming from Chrome directly in OBS by dragging the bar here And taking it further if I go to Advanced Audio Properties find the correct source I can set it to track 1 for all of my streamers here

[03:33] but I'll also select another single track to isolate it for recording. Now, let's add our game. I'm going to open Stardew Valley. Now that I have it open, I'm going to add an audio app capture. I'll select Stardew from the dropdown,

[03:45] and if you look, it's now appearing in the levels, and it's on its own source. Again, go to Advanced Audio Properties, Send it to stream, of course, but also select another track with nothing else on it so it's isolated.

[03:58] We'll do this exact same process again for Discord and now as you can see we have four audio sources. Game, Discord, Music or Chrome and most importantly our microphone. All of these will go to stream and all of these will also go to individual tracks.

[04:11] Now we've created three major problems. First, if you switch games you would need to edit this app capture every time. That sucks. But there is a very easy solution which I'll cover in a second. Second problem, these are specific sources inside a specific scene.

[04:25] Meaning if you want an audio source to be streamed or recorded in another scene, these captures need to be added to that scene. And if you don't add them, then it won't appear there at all. So copy and paste these audio sources over into whatever scenes you want them in,

[04:37] or put them all in a folder and copy that over. The other problem is any, let's say, Twitch sub or follower alerts that make sounds might not be going out to viewers on stream anymore. because most people capture their alerts

[04:49] through a desktop capture like we used at the start by setting it to monitor only. So essentially, they're monitoring it, they can hear it, which means Twitch also hears it. If you're no longer using a desktop capture, you change any OBS

[05:01] audio, such as alerts, to monitor and output. That way, you hear it but because it also outputs if it on track one so does stream And for the sound of the alerts to be available in your edit radar you can also isolate them to their own track But what about the game switching issue Well OBS thought of that and added a great little

[05:19] tick box. So I'm going to delete Stardew Valley's audio app capture, double click the game capture I am using to capture it, and tick this little capture audio button. I'll see that now Stardew is on its own audio track here in OBS again, but it's actually called game capture or whatever the

[05:34] name of the capture source you're using is. I'll go back to advanced audio, I'll make sure it's on track one, and I'll again make sure it's isolated on its own track for the edit. And now if I close Stardew Valley and open Peak and make that game capture capture Peak, it will instantly put Peak

[05:48] on its own track because I'm no longer capturing the application specifically, and instead I'm using the game capture to create a specific audio track for it. A little complicated, but also not really at all. Once I've done all of this, I want to make sure it's working, so I'm going to record

[06:00] for a little bit, and I'm going to take that fragmented mp4 file that I recorded, drag it into any decent editing software, this time I'm using Premiere, and you'll see I have six tracks up here. If we go through them, track one has my mic, my music, all chrome, my game, and my discord.

[06:15] Track two is just my microphone. Track three is just my game. Track four is my music, and track five is my discord. With this, I'll delete track one, because I don't need everything mushed together, I

[06:27] have them individually. and I don't want my music or my discord so I'll delete track 4 and 5 and then the unused track 6 has nothing on it today so I'll get rid of that as well and now I have just my microphone and just

[06:39] my game audio completely isolated and ready to edit to my heart's content congratulations for that all of your audio is now split but wouldn't it be cool if you could do that with your visuals oh wait you can and I made a tutorial about it right here or you can become a member of the

[06:51] channel for just one dollar right here bye