Question / Help Streaming Audio

[Zeris]

Hello friends!

I have a bit of an issue with my audio setup for my stream. I have a sound card and an external capture card. Currently, my gaming laptop is my streaming PC and my AverMedia Live Gamer Extreme capture card pulls video from my graphics card, yadda yadda. What I've been doing for audio is having my capture card listen to the Stereo Mix in my sound card and I was getting reliable audio for my stream that way. However, I was limited to only using analog headsets that would plug into my sound card because if I set anything else as my default audio source then obviously audio doesn't play through my sound card anymore and I get no audio on my stream.

I currently have a USB headset that I just got and I really like, but since my default audio source has to be the USB headphones in order for me to hear anything, my audio setup for my stream doesn't work. I've tried different "listen" combinations in the sound settings (including going through the audio drivers on my motherboard) and nothing seems to work. When I stream, I'm currently using a pair of earbuds plugged into my sound card so I can do the same thing I was doing before: having my capture card "listen" to the Stereo Mix of my sound card.

Is there a way for me to have my capture card "listen" to the audio from my USB headphones? Is it something I can do with Virtual Audio Cable or VoiceMeeter? I'm confident other streamers use USB headphones and I'm just wondering what step I'm missing in order to get my audio to work on my stream. Thanks in advance!

 

[koala]

You miss a tiny bit of audio mixing and routing features in OBS.
How audio works in Windows:

• every Windows app outputs its audio to an output audio device. Common output audio devices are Speakers, Headphones, any virtual audio device. The Stereo Mix device is a virtual device that is created by Windows internally by mixing all the other audio devices and output the mix to Stereo Mix
• every Windows app is allowed to read audio from input audio devices. Common input audio devices are Microphone.
• One of all output devices and one of all input devices are marked as default. If you select an audio device called "default" anywhere, the device is substituted that is currently marked as default. Usually, the "Speakers" output device is default, or the last plugged in device. If you remove the default device, the device that previously was marked as default is default again.
• In some Windows app, you can configure the input and output device. If a Windows app doesn't have this feature, it uses the default devices.

How this is used in OBS:

• OBS can capture any Windows output audio device and Windows input device
• You connect each Windows device to OBS either with Settings->Audio (the upper part of the dialog). Audio devices configured here are available globally in every scene
• Or you don't configure a device in Settings->Audio but add an Audio Input Capture or Audio Output Capture source in a scene. Some video sources add audio as well.

Now the crucial part relevant to you:

To explicitly mix which audio source goes to which track in a recording or stream, right-click the audio mixer -> Advanced audio properties. In the checkbox matrix on the right, you define which source should go into which track. If you use this mixer, you don't ever need to use the Stereo Mix Windows audio source, because you are able to exactly define which source is used and which is not.

Example:

In this example, game+headset+micro are mixed into track 1 suitable for streaming output or fast preview of a recording. In case I want to do postprocessing, all sources are recorded a second time each in a separate track.