Question / Help Audio routing Help

[faaslave]

I have an iMac I am going to use running OBS for a podcast. I use a digital mixer Behringer X32. The mixer can connect to Logic Pro via USB. My question is this. I want to run the L/R Mains out my mixer to the iMac and select that sound source on the OSB software. I am having trouble getting this to work. I select X-USB on the sound preferences panel, and that seems to work for the mac. In OBS, I select X-USB and nothing. Does anyone have a good way to route the sound from my mixer to the OBS software on my mac?

Thanks,

Dave

 

[Narcogen]

LoopBack. OBS doesn't have a way of selecting tracks from a multitrack USB device.

https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/

 

[faaslave]

Thanks, I'll look at it. You would think it would be very simple to route a mixer output to a mac. The X-usb protocol wortks great between logic and the mixer. 32 tracks back and forth. But when you just want the L and R Mains out of the mixer to the mac on usb, nothing works. I shouldn't havbe to run logic or anything else for that, but........ I guess you do.

 

[Narcogen]

OBS understand mono, stereo, and surround sound, like you'd get from a capture card connected to a gaming console. It's multitrack audio program in the sense that it can include multiple audio streams inside an MKV or MP4 container, but it's not a DAW or anything like that, and on top of it, unlike on Windows there's no way for OBS to just request access to the default audio device for capture, hence the need for 3rd party software for that.

OBS has no way of knowing what the L and R mains are on your mixer. I'm guessing it's just picking, if anything, the first two channels it sees, and those aren't them, for whatever reason. Some people seem to just plug in multichannel mixers and they work fine without any special efforts, and others end up having to use 3rd party software to route.

 

[faaslave]

It is very confusing to say the least. Right now I have the sound out my computer going to my mixer via the headphone jack to a paired set of aux jacks. Then on my mixer, I have all of the inputs including the microphones. Obviously I want to run all sound into my mixer then out to the mac, so OBS can grab the sound. Here are some screen shots. Not sure if i set the midi up or what? Just when I thought I knew what was going on. lol

 

[Narcogen]

If you're using LoopBack you really don't need to do anything in MIDI setup. That's mostly for using iShowU or SoundFlower, programs that don't have any method of specifying a passthrough or monitoring device.

Make a virtual device in LoopBack's interface. Add whatever hardware devices you want to it, and then route the channels as you see fit.

To be honest, I really, really wish that LoopBack had not completely changed their GUI between version 1.x and 2.x They consider it an improvement, but I can't figure out the new interface at all. With the old one, you just checked a box for "manual channel mapping" and then selected the channels you wanted from a drop-down, but I guess people found it confusing.

 

[faaslave]

With Logic Pro and my Behringer X32 mixer it is easy. Everything works via the X-32 protocol, over USB. Under this new scenario I am using my mixer to podcast and send everything to OBS. I kind of got it working, but I don't resally understand the logic, and I may be trying to go about this wrong. My imac sends sound to my mixer. I have a 3.5mm cord out the headphone jacks to a pair of aux in's on the board. Now I mix in my microphones or anything connected to my mixer. I changed that to sending that same signal over usb now. Then I have the main outs that need to get back to the imac with the finished product. Plus my headphones are plugged into the mixer, so I am not really monitoring the signal after it gets back to OBS. Seems like there is a chance I am hearing everything just fine, but what I am sending out might be a really bad sound. Also, it looks like when the imac gets the main signal back from the mixer, it is on channel 1 and 2 no matter what you want. Is that on top of whatever I already have on channel 1 and 2, like my microphones? Maybe I have to send any signals I normally get from my computer to the mixer from a different computer, so I am only sending a signsl to the imac running OBS. Very confusing. It sure would be nice if one piece of software just handled all this . Loopback has a bundle with about five apps for not much more than loopback by itself. I bought the bundle, in case Ias m going to need another one of their apps to make all this work.

When going to the sound prefences on the imac, I am assuming that the out should be X32 (usb) and for the incoming signal I should select Loopback. RIght now I have x32 selected for the input, and it is getting the signal from the mixer. From wehsat I am reading, it seems I should have the loopback one selected.

Thanks for all your help, I just can't wrap my head asround this logic.

Dave

 

[Narcogen]

When going to the sound prefences on the imac, I am assuming that the out should be X32 (usb) and for the incoming signal I should select Loopback. RIght now I have x32 selected for the input, and it is getting the signal from the mixer. From wehsat I am reading, it seems I should have the loopback one selected.

Thanks for all your help, I just can't wrap my head asround this logic.

Dave

Yes.

OBS has no way of capturing your Mac's default sound output-- audio made by programs. Most people using OBS want this (usually to capture a game). This may not be true in your case.

For those use cases, you create a virtual device in LoopBack, set that as the default Output device in the Mac's Sound preferences. Then you tell LoopBack to monitor that virtual device using whatever hardware device you usually listen to.

(Audio monitoring from OBS also works now on MacOS-- it didn't always. So you can, if you choose, not monitor anything in LoopBack, but instead monitor out of OBS. That setting is in Settings > Advanced.

I assume that the audio you're trying to put into OBS is coming from the mixer, and not from the Mac's actual output (programs running on the Mac as opposed to a device connected to the Mac).

In this case, my suggested use for LoopBack is different. You want to create a virtual device that allows OBS to see only specific channels from the mixer, in case just adding the mixer to OBS as a source either doesn't work, or doesn't allow you to pick the channels you want.

So you make the virtual device, add the mixer to it as a hardware source, turn on manual channel mapping, and select the channels from the mixer you want.

Unfortunately there's a bug in LoopBack v2 that means I'm not currently using it, but in V1 the interface for this looks like the attached screenshot. That's only a stereo USB interface so there are only two channels, but you can drag the little "left" and "right" buttons from the top of the window down to the bottom of the window, and assign them where you like. You can also add more channels, as I did there. Hopefully when you add your mixer to LoopBack as a hardware device, it will show up as more than 2 channels, which I think in OBS, natively, it won't.

Looking at the diagram, I think the thing most OBS users would not be doing would be trying to get audio from iTunes, Skype, or Safari into the mixer, because LoopBack provides a method of doing that directly (the usual use case for LoopBack I described up above).

In your case, if the mixer puts input from those connections on a different channel than the microphones because you want to control them independently, then OBS might not see them if you just add the mixer as an input in OBS, but you might be able to do it with LoopBack.

It's always good to try the trial version first.