Question / Help Assistance setting up Audio Interface -> DAW -> OBS

ishmayl

New Member
I'm having some issues getting audio for Twitch streaming to work the way I want it to work. This may end up being a long post, but to make sure to explain all the issues I've had, I want to put as many details as possible.

I am using a Mac to stream live music to Twitch. This is what my signal chain looks like for both piano and vocals:

DIgital Piano -> Midi Out -> Focusrite Scarlett 18i6 -> USB Out -> Mac Mini 2013 -> Reaper

Condenser Mic -> XLR -> Focusrite Scarlett 18i6 -> USB Out -> Mac Mini 2013 -> Reaper

As anyone who has used an audio interface into Reaper knows, there are basically no problems getting this to work. I have a great sound mix, my midi VSTs are working fine, and the audio comes back out of my Scarlett perfectly. However, as we also all know, Macs are kind of stupid about sending computer audio to different places. To send audio from Reaper into OBS, we have to use a virtual audio cable or some similar routing option.

So far, I have tried three different free options, to varying degrees of "success" ("Success" qualified below):

  1. SoundFlower - Basically non-working for me. I found the kext-signed version that supposedly works on El Capitan, and it simply just never worked for me. SoundFlower shows up as options in the AudioMidi control panel, but nothing I did would send the audio to OBS
  2. JackRouter - It technically "works," but it is so glitchy/buggy that it may as well not worked. I've missed several scheduled streams because the Routing interface is so glitchy that I can't send the signal to OBS.
  3. iShowU - My best success so far, but there's a major hiccup. Setting it up in the way shown in Chupacabra Tutorials' "OBS for Mac: Updated Setup Guide & Soundflower Audio Alternative" youtube tutorial, basically I can get the midi part of my signal chain handled just fine, but I can never get the audio from my mic into Reaper using this tutorial. So while I can get my mic audio into OBS as a secondary audio input, because it's not coming through Reaper, I can't use the audio FX I like to use.

So that's the "success." Basically, I would call said success at-best, very minor levels of success. With none of those three options am I able to just simply stream the way I want to stream.

Here are my hopes: A) Someone on these forums have had these literal exact same issues, using my exact same (or similar) setup, and knows exactly how to fix them, or B) Someone knows enough in general about setting up Macs for streaming OBS from a DAW, that they will be able to give me some new advice I haven't found anywhere else.

This is something I've been working on since the beginning of the year.

TL;DR: To reiterate, I have technically gotten Reaper to stream to OBS on my Mac, but in no means in the way that I would like it to work so that I can use all the options I would like to use. Please help!
 

blinovitch

New Member
I haven't tried something like this myself, so this is more a possibility that occurred to me than a suggestion.

Have you thought about using a secondary USB interface, like a Behringer UCA200? You could route Reaper's fully mixed output, piano plus mic, to outputs on the Focusrite, then into the second interface's analog inputs, then back into the Mac through USB to OBS. I know some podcasters swear by those little interfaces as a way to easily get computer audio into their mixers.

Or could you use the Mac Mini's audio input similarly? Run output from the Focusrite to the Mini's audio input, and send that to OBS? That might call for a DI box or other attenuator.
 

ishmayl

New Member
I haven't tried something like this myself, so this is more a possibility that occurred to me than a suggestion.

Have you thought about using a secondary USB interface, like a Behringer UCA200? You could route Reaper's fully mixed output, piano plus mic, to outputs on the Focusrite, then into the second interface's analog inputs, then back into the Mac through USB to OBS. I know some podcasters swear by those little interfaces as a way to easily get computer audio into their mixers.

Or could you use the Mac Mini's audio input similarly? Run output from the Focusrite to the Mini's audio input, and send that to OBS? That might call for a DI box or other attenuator.

For your first advice, I would be happy to give something like that a try, however wouldn't that cause a good bit of delay/latency which may cause issues streaming? (Just asking out of not knowing, not assuming anything) However, with that said, I'm going to pull out my old Behringer mixer and see if I can finagle something with it. Thanks for the advice/idea!

For the second option, I've thought about it, but generally speaking, the audio quality of using the computer's built-in inputs like that is significantly less than I would prefer.
 

blinovitch

New Member
For your first advice, I would be happy to give something like that a try, however wouldn't that cause a good bit of delay/latency which may cause issues streaming? (Just asking out of not knowing, not assuming anything) However, with that said, I'm going to pull out my old Behringer mixer and see if I can finagle something with it. Thanks for the advice/idea!

I wondered whether delay might be an issue, since I wasn't sure whether your audio needed to be in sync with any video. Still worth trying if you already have a second interface on hand, though.

Rogue Amoeba's Loopback is a non-free, more feature-ful version of Soundflower, so that's a software option you could test.
 
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