4 mic podcasts - feel like I'm doing something wrong

[Just Push record Studios]

Hey everyone, so here’s the situation. We rent out our Podcast Studio, and to be honest, we’ve kind of had issues with audio the entire six months that we’ve had it rented.

It seems like every podcast we would randomly have a mic decide to not work or mic three (out of 4) would randomly not work. We were using at first a four-mic tascam audio interface, but then we couldn’t divide the mics into 4 separate tracks, so then we bought two one-mic interfaces and then kept the four-mic tascam to use for mics 3 and 4... this had crazy problems and now we finally have four different mic interfaces with four different mics.

All four audio tracks seem to work well. I’ve been recording on MP4 this whole time for convenience and now I just found out through a lot of reading that I need to be recording on MKV -- so we’ve updated that.

I've gone through soooo much BS with OBS over the past year and I finally feel like I have a grasp on how things work under the hood.

Now, the annoying part I’m dealing with is the fact that every time I click on the video only one of the mics plays. This drove me INSANE the other day until I read a forum about turning it from MKV --> MP4 --> and then adding it to Premier Pro which then allows you to hear all the mics. Now it makes sense.

Of course, once it’s added to premiere Pro, and then exported to an MP4 file again, then the audio sounds great… But I feel like I’m missing something.

At this moment, if I want to have a normal file where all 4 mics work that I can send to our podcast studio renters, here's the steps I have to follow:

1. Remux the MKV to MP4
2. Download the MP4 (I'm not in the studio)
3. Upload the MP4 to Premier Pro (since I can only hear 1 mic otherwise)
4. Download the MP4 off of Premier Pro

It seems crazy to me that I have to do all of that just to hear the audio. Am I missing a step or is this really the amount of effort I'm going to have to go through on each episode?

Any advice would be amazing. Thank you!

PS. The good news is that we never have audio issues now and EVERY MIC WORKS which is so incredible... but yeah would prefer to not have 85 steps just to get a legit file back to someone for them to edit.

 

[AaronD]

Do you have some experience in something like this already?:

System Overview

www.youtube.com

System Running

www.youtube.com

Or are you starting completely from scratch?

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If you have that kind of experience, then OBS will likely be annoying because it doesn't follow that standard (it came at it from a different direction and ended up with a pile of band-aids that the devs want to get rid of but haven't figured out the details yet of what to replace it with), but it can be made to work...sorta.

You'll also know what I mean when I tell you to bypass OBS's audio altogether and use a DAW instead, and run the final result from the DAW to OBS as its only audio source to pass through unchanged. Or up to 6 separate sources, each of which goes to a different Track in OBS, still passing through unchanged.

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If you don't have that experience, then both signal-flow design itself, and OBS's band-aids, are going to be a confusing mess for you. It's not "just sound". It's, "Where you do want that sound to go?", and, "What do you want it to do along the way?" Different destinations may or may not have different processing. Some things may or may not need to affect others. Most processors have controls that don't make sense until you've studied it a while, and then, "It sounds wrong, what do I do?", becomes, "The compressor needs a slower release, so I'll just do that and listen some more," etc.

For what you're doing, I'd still recommend a DAW to figure things out and just give OBS the answer, but it's also going to be a learning curve to set that up. At least the DAW follows the professional standards, which are what they are for very good reasons.

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DAW = Digital Audio Workstation. It's practically a complete sound studio in one app. It's designed only for processing audio, and it's REALLY GOOD AT IT!!!

Lots of them to choose from, with a wide range of prices and features, which don't correlate very well to each other. So you might as well pick a good free one. I like this one:

https://ardour.org/

 

[AaronD]

Now, the annoying part I’m dealing with is the fact that every time I click on the video only one of the mics plays. This drove me INSANE the other day until I read a forum about turning it from MKV --> MP4 --> and then adding it to Premier Pro which then allows you to hear all the mics. Now it makes sense.

Of course, once it’s added to premiere Pro, and then exported to an MP4 file again, then the audio sounds great… But I feel like I’m missing something.

Does your player only play Track 1, and you've put each mic on a different Track in OBS to keep them separate? If so, then Premiere is probably just downmixing all tracks into Track 1, which is why your player then gives you all of them. But then they can't be separated anymore either.

I think your original file is fine. You just need a better player, or to learn what options your player has. Maybe it *can* select different audio tracks, and you've never messed with that.

 

[koala]

To make it more clear what AaronD said in the last post: media players will never mix audio tracks. They will only play back one track at a time. So if you have 4 different audio tracks in your video, media players will pick the first and play back only that. You can switch to different tracks.
If you want to listen to the 4 tracks as mixed audio, you need to create one mixed audio track in a postprocessing step that contains the mixed 4 tracks and replace your 4 single tracks with the mixed track. This separate track handling and mixing in postprocessing is the point of multi track audio. If you don't want to do this postprocessing, don't export 4 separate audio tracks.

If you just want the mixed audio and no postprocessing, don't output 4 separate audio tracks by OBS. Instead, mix them in 1 audio track in OBS and output this track. OBS has a fair integrated audio mixer for that. To enable you to optionally postprocess the tracks separately and have one mixed track at the same time, do continue to output the 4 separate track, but add a 5th track and assign all 4 mics to it in OBS Advanced Audio Properties. Make this track 1 to make media players choose this mixed track as default playback track and use tracks 2..5 for one mic each.

 

[Just Push record Studios]

To make it more clear what AaronD said in the last post: media players will never mix audio tracks. They will only play back one track at a time. So if you have 4 different audio tracks in your video, media players will pick the first and play back only that. You can switch to different tracks.
If you want to listen to the 4 tracks as mixed audio, you need to create one mixed audio track in a postprocessing step that contains the mixed 4 tracks and replace your 4 single tracks with the mixed track. This separate track handling and mixing in postprocessing is the point of multi track audio. If you don't want to do this postprocessing, don't export 4 separate audio tracks.

If you just want the mixed audio and no postprocessing, don't output 4 separate audio tracks by OBS. Instead, mix them in 1 audio track in OBS and output this track. OBS has a fair integrated audio mixer for that. To enable you to optionally postprocess the tracks separately and have one mixed track at the same time, do continue to output the 4 separate track, but add a 5th track and assign all 4 mics to it in OBS Advanced Audio Properties. Make this track 1 to make media players choose this mixed track as default playback track and use tracks 2..5 for one mic each.

Yeah i think that's a great solution. However, if we have mics 2-5 going won't there be an echo of some kind if mic 1 has all other mics going? Or will there not be an echo since it's only playing 1 track?

 

[koala]

Since every media player only plays one track at a time only, there is no spilling of audio from one track to a different track. If you mix all 4 mics into track 1, and later play back the video, and the media player is playing track 1, it doesn't matter what is in other tracks. There can be as many other tracks with whatever sources in them. The mics you're also output to track 1 or whatever else. If the media player is playing track 1, it's only playing what is contained in track 1.

 

[Just Push record Studios]

Okay good point - alright thank you!