How to stop OBS taking over my audio when not broadcasting

[mattsid99]

Hi, totally new to OBS, so apologies in advance if this has been asked before. I did do a search, but couldn't find any answers.

I am using OBS to teach with a third party teaching platform. However, I will often be preparing my lessons with OBS and I want to listen to music on my bluetooth speaker, but OBS seems to take over the audio output and totally changes the sound so it's very tinny and a lot of echo. I've tried clicking on everything I can find, but nothing seems to stop it. This also happens in all programs, websites, and apps.

I would love any advice how to fix it, if it is fixable, because it's very annoying. Thanks for any answers.

 

[AaronD]

Bluetooth itself has a problem with audio. A given device has two options:

• High-quality speaker only
• Low-quality speaker + mic

If *anything* asks for the mic, it has to switch to that mode, which affects *everything* that goes to the speaker. Depending on your operating system - I think Windows does this - the two modes may appear as different devices, so anything that is sent to the high-quality logical device just quietly disappears when the physical device is in the low-quality mode. If that's the case, then the OS may also have an automatic device-switch so that you still hear "something", but anything that is set to use the high-quality device specifically, and not follow the OS's switch, becomes silent.

---

For the echo, that's probably a feedback loop. If a global Desktop Audio source, or an Audio Output Capture source in the active scene, is set to the same device as the Monitor, and you send that source to the Monitor, that's a feedback loop, and each repeat of the same sound is another trip around that loop. The time between repeats is the latency of your audio system. It can be slow enough to perceive as a discrete echo, or fast enough to blend together as a "weird sound" or a crude reverb.

It doesn't matter where you break the loop - don't Monitor that source, set them to different devices, etc. - just as long as you do, somewhere.

 

[mattsid99]

Bluetooth itself has a problem with audio. A given device has two options:

• High-quality speaker only
• Low-quality speaker + mic

If *anything* asks for the mic, it has to switch to that mode, which affects *everything* that goes to the speaker. Depending on your operating system - I think Windows does this - the two modes may appear as different devices, so anything that is sent to the high-quality logical device just quietly disappears when the physical device is in the low-quality mode. If that's the case, then the OS may also have an automatic device-switch so that you still hear "something", but anything that is set to use the high-quality device specifically, and not follow the OS's switch, becomes silent.

---

For the echo, that's probably a feedback loop. If a global Desktop Audio source, or an Audio Output Capture source in the active scene, is set to the same device as the Monitor, and you send that source to the Monitor, that's a feedback loop, and each repeat of the same sound is another trip around that loop. The time between repeats is the latency of your audio system. It can be slow enough to perceive as a discrete echo, or fast enough to blend together as a "weird sound" or a crude reverb.

It doesn't matter where you break the loop - don't Monitor that source, set them to different devices, etc. - just as long as you do, somewhere.

Thanks so much. I disabled the microphone in the audio settings and it fixed the problem.