Question / Help Desktop audio slider only works for recording, not live monitoring.

[Reality Studio LLC]

I just installed OBS and for the most part everything works, but I'm having an issue with desktop audio. I only have two sources of audio, the microphone and audio generated from Windows like game audio. My issue is that in obs when I slide around the mic audio slider I can hear myself realtime on my headphones getting louder or quieter so that works fine, but the desktop audio slider over my headphones does nothing at all. However when I listen to recordings after the fact I can see that desktop audio changes did work there and I can see both audio sources changing volume as I play with the sliders. It's just in realtime monitoring that the desktop audio does nothing.

Any idea how this is fixed? Right now I can't stream this way because I have no way of knowing what my actual desktop audio sounds like when live, the only way I can know is to stop streaming and play back the recorded video which isn't idea. I have tried the various suggestions like explicitly setting my desktop audio source rather than leaving it at default, but that didn't make any difference.

 

[Reality Studio LLC]

Anyone have any insights to this? Or does the "desktop audio" slider not work for monitoring on a pc and only applies to the recorded video?

 

[Reality Studio LLC]

Still working on this with no luck, so I'm trying to simplify my test case to help get to the root of the problem. I'm eliminating games totally from the equation, instead I put on my headphones, run obs, and play music on Spotify.

Now I can see the audio levels bouncing around on the "desktop audio" slider, and I can hear the music perfectly, so audio is coming through correctly as I both hear it and see the levels graphically being displayed, that's cool.

Now can anyone tell me what happens on your machine when you move the "desktop audio" slider around in such a circumstance? On my machine the audio levels graphically will change along with the slider, and they will also change on the recorded footage. But when listening live I notice no volume change whatsoever. That's whats confounding me because I can't for the life of me figure out how the live streamers do it if they can't hear audio changes in realtime. So in my case if I live streamed and someone said game audio for example was too loud compared to mic audio, I currently can't do anything about it because I can slide around the desktop audio slider anywhere and it makes no actually difference to the live audio volume levels, it only affects the levels recorded to the mp4 file.

I've been working on this for a few days and have tried quite a few things including using onboard Realtek audio or NVidia audio, but same result on both. I've tried different headsets both wired and wireless just in case, same result. I've tried chainging the playback device, but no luck. Tried making all settings in OBS, rebooting, then trying them all fresh and no luck. I tried on three different computers, a desktop, a laptop and a nuc, all have the same issue. I tried with multiple mics including a webcam mic, a camcorder mic, a yeti mic, etc and no luck.

I'll keep investigating as I assume there must be some way for people to adjust volume in realtime and hear it in their headphones as I've seen people do it with just a laptop and webcam, but I still haven't figured out how yet. I'll keep trying, but if anyone has any insights to how to fix this it would be much appreciated as I'm running out of ideas, but I will keep googling, I just can't find any information on this issue.