Can't switch from live to media source *with* audio in both?

[legalofficeguru]

I've searched for posts on this forum and watched a dozen YouTube videos, and I still can't figure this out. It seems like OBS ought to give me a way to switch from one scene with a mic to another with a media source and still be able to pick up the audio from each.

I've installed a virtual audio cable to get the audio from the media source and set it as the monitor device:

I thought this setup would work, but I can only output audio to Zoom with the media source; even though the mic is set up as the device for the audio virtual cable to listen to, there is no mic audio in Zoom when I switch to the scene with the mic, even though the audio mixer below seems to indicate it's picking up the mic.

(DOES NOT output audio to Zoom)

(DOES output audio to Zoom)

When testing the audio in Zoom, what's being picked up is the media source playing in a loop, not my mic.

(Only hears media source output; hears nothing when scene switched to "mic".

Surely I'm not going to have to switch OBS advanced audio settings in the middle of a live Zoom to make this work. Shouldn't I be able to pre-configure this so each scene has its own audio source without me having to fiddle with settings (either in OBS or Zoom) mid-stream?

(NOTE: I'm an OBS noob. I've tried my best to research this here and elsewhere, and this is as close as I've come to a solution. It took me an entire day just to get the media source audio to work. The above seemed logical to me, but clearly I misunderstand how this works.)

Log here: https://obsproject.com/logs/AxKMfrtlWlEEy7Bj

 

[AaronD]

If you want something to be heard in multiple scenes, you need to either have it in every scene, or use a global source in Settings -> Audio.

No matter how you do it, keep track of everything you have (even if you're just tinkering), and only have one copy of each device active at any given time. It doesn't crash or anything like that, but the copy that you forgot about is still mixing with everything else that you thought was all there was, and that other source that you're not accounting for often causes some audible weirdness.