OBS Audio capturing issue
6 years ago
Montana, USA

I know I could ask this over on OBS boards but I come here a lot more often, and I've tried googling for this but apparently I suck at google because I can't find the answer for the specific thing I'm looking for.

I want to capture audio from a specific window in OBS. I have no issues capturing sound in general, but the most obvious ways of capturing sound make certain things really awkward.

For example, I want to capture the audio from my Mic (easy) and only my 20XX window. I can just do it the normal way and capture all the audio, but if I'm using headphones and someone mentions my audio sounds funky and I open up my stream to watch...

Well, it starts recording the sounds from my stream and repeats that, then records it again as it plays again, and so on so forth. Makes it impossible to diagnose without a secondary device, which is plain inconvenient.

Plus, Window noises that happen sometimes are annoying, and I don't want to capture them. Anyone know how to capture only from specific sources?

Antarctica

The problem sounds like you're capturing your desktop audio into OBS when you capture the window. This means that if you open up your own stream with the volume unmuted, you'll get in infinite loop of your sound being repeated into OBS which get some outputted on your stream which gets captured by OBS and so on.

I don't know if OBS has a way built in to isolate and mix individual audio channels. It sounds like you're going to need a virtual audio mixer so that you can limit certain channels to OBS and limit others to your headset which will allow you to control it like you want. I know jack squat about audio but I know there are some free virtual mixers out there that might do what you want but it might require some googling and testing on your part.

Hopefully an audio guru might be able to help you with some more specific info (or maybe OBS can do this itself and I just don't know how, my stream setup is always super basic so I never really explore this stuff).

United States

So, the shortest answer to your problem is that, no, you can't capture audio from just specific windows or whatever, you capture from ¤devices¤, and whatever's being piped through that device is being recorded. The fast and dirty way to isolate the audio of your game is to right click on the speaker in the task bar, open up the audio mixer, and mute everything but your game. You can even mute Windows sounds this way! There is other ways to do this, like using software or separate sound cards to pipe audio to different devices, and having OBS record those devices instead of your headset audio, but I assume you want free and easy instead of things for money that require setting up and reading docs for.

Now, to get to your problem of live mixing, the simple answer is...-don't-! Don't mix live.

Record some early splits to an MP4 while you test out your stream, keeping an eye on your mixer to check your levels (I spring for somewhere between 6-9 DB of headroom on my voice, and 3 DB of headroom between my voice and game audio). Then when you're feeling confident that it -looks good- from just the DB meter, listen to the file (remember to unmute things in your Windows Volume Mixer!) and make sure everything's doing okay. It should sound a bit quiet to you, but that's actually a good thing for boring engineering reasons (most professional audio you listen to has gone through dynamic range compression to sound louder without clipping, there's been an ongoing loudness war in audio processing for a long time, blah blah blah...).

Esperanto

The easiest solution to this would be to basically use the Windows Mixer to mute out software you don't want noise to get picked up on.

When I was diagnosing audio problems, I'd test setting by recording video and rewatching it, not streaming it online and trying to watch that stream online while streaming online. Ideally, OBS would be able to have a mixer for individual tracks from separate pieces of software, but it doesn't.

However, that wouldn't really allow you to watch your own stream to listen to how the mix sounds live anyways either. If the sounds of a window are open during stream, and you are listening to the stream to test it, you are going to hear the original sound plus it duplicated on the stream. If the sounds of a window are muted during stream, and you are listening to the stream to test it, you wouldn't be testing anything because you've muted the object you are listening for.

Germany

I don't know if 20XX has the option to pick an output device, but if that's there, you could get a cheap USB-soundcard like the ones often packaged with headsets and have only the game's audio run through that and muting your main audio output device in OBS.