Add background music from YouTube

[PaulCroft]

Good day

I manage our church's social media and we are setting up streaming of our services. I've been doing test broadcasts for the past couple of weeks working out the kinks but I am struggling to set something up.

At the start of our service, before we go live, I have a still image of our church. I would like to add some background music (hymns) from YouTube to play during this time, and also during a break in the service as we change from one session to another. I see many places that show how to add music from your files, but I would prefer this to come from various YouTube sources that have the music we'd like to add. I'm just not sure how to set it up. I have the scenes in place with the image but cannot get the music work.

TIA

 

[AaronD]

That's a sticky situation with copyright. YouTube is not meant for anything beyond your personal living room, streamed directly from the site. Using it for anything else is likely to get you shut down. Fair Use *may* apply, but don't count on it.

Get your content from somewhere that can give you direct, provable permission to do *exactly* what you're doing with it, which is surprisingly granular, and then put that proof in your stream. License number in the description, or whatever it is. If you don't have that permission, *don't use it*!

We don't stream our in-house prelude music. We have a separate library for that part of the stream that we know is okay. So our audio console has two different things in two different inputs at the same time for that part, and it sends each one to a different place: one to the PA and one to the stream.

U.S. Federal Law covers the performance of music during the service itself, in person. No difference between live or recorded - it's all performance - and no difference between "religious" or "secular" either. So if you wanted to blast some 70's rock and roll during the service, that's legal too...though you probably don't want to for other reasons. :-)

But that's ALL that the law covers. Not lyrics - those were historically covered by the purchase price of physical hymnals - and not broadcast. Legally, your stream is the same as a commercial TV station. You must have permission for *absolutely everything* that goes into it, regardless of time or purpose.

YouTube does not give that permission.

 

[PaulCroft]

That's a sticky situation with copyright. YouTube is not meant for anything beyond your personal living room, streamed directly from the site. Using it for anything else is likely to get you shut down. Fair Use *may* apply, but don't count on it.

Get your content from somewhere that can give you direct, provable permission to do *exactly* what you're doing with it, which is surprisingly granular, and then put that proof in your stream. License number in the description, or whatever it is. If you don't have that permission, *don't use it*!

We don't stream our in-house prelude music. We have a separate library for that part of the stream that we know is okay. So our audio console has two different things in two different inputs at the same time for that part, and it sends each one to a different place: one to the PA and one to the stream.

U.S. Federal Law covers the performance of music during the service itself, in person. No difference between live or recorded - it's all performance - and no difference between "religious" or "secular" either. So if you wanted to blast some 70's rock and roll during the service, that's legal too...though you probably don't want to for other reasons. :-)

But that's ALL that the law covers. Not lyrics - those were historically covered by the purchase price of physical hymnals - and not broadcast. Legally, your stream is the same as a commercial TV station. You must have permission for *absolutely everything* that goes into it, regardless of time or purpose.

YouTube does not give that permission.

Thanks Aaron for the reply. I understand what you’re saying and it’s probably valid. I’m not sure if US copyright law applies as we are located in Canada, but I think I’m going to take another route. I’ve found a place where I can download instrumental hymns. I was able to combine into a file so I have about a dozen hymns on a loop that I’m going to test next week. It worked on a test broadcast I did this afternoon so I think that’ll solve the issue and avoid any problems with YouTube. The website has a copyright notice that has to be posted and that should make it all pass any copyright issues.

OBS has been a bit of a challenge. My last challenge is to get our sound crystal clear which I believe I’ll have solved this week.

 

[AaronD]

Sounds like you're well on your way.

My last challenge is to get our sound crystal clear which I believe I’ll have solved this week.

Yes! A lot of people have trouble with that. There's a big difference between "live" and "distributed" audio levels, and you can't "just turn it up".

"Live", doesn't know what's coming, so you have to leave some headroom. Around -18dBFS seems to be a de-facto standard, but nothing says you absolutely *must* be exactly there.

"Distributed", is supposed to have tamed everything - no rogue peaks or fluctuations - so it knows all of what's coming in full detail. Its problem is a (relatively) poor distribution medium like vinyl, cassette tape, radio, or internet stream, and an often-poor listening environment. So you want it as loud as you can get it to overcome most of those problems. The professional standard is pretty much filling/slamming the meter, but never going over. You can't do that just by turning it up. If you send it a "live" level, it'll be really quiet for your listeners who are used to commercial broadcasts and releases.

The difference is compression. Fairly aggressive compression! You're going to take out a lot of the "live" feel, but the listening environment can't really support that anyway.

How you do that, depends heavily on what gear you have. It's possible to do it all in OBS, but the lack of metering makes it really hard to set up. Much better to do it in a digital console or DAW, and send the final result to OBS as its only audio source to pass through unchanged.