Incorporating Advanced Audio Properties into Audio Mixer Interface

[Spookopheles]

This is only a mockup and value numbers are inaccurate. I'm mostly curious of what others think of the idea.
Tracks and Mono button are togglable, theyd light up for on or be dark for off. "Active" statuses are the red dot to the left of each channel's name, which is fine if my assumption that active and inactive are the only states for that. The thickness of each channel slot is about equal to the current one, because the volume slider is reduced in size, so there is no increase in vertical space. Sync Offset isn't something i really use, so i didn't think it appropriate to determine its new location myself. To reduce visual confusion from the clutter, ive given each channel a kind of background color, where the advanced audio options act a bit like separators visually.

Now, im sure this wouldnt really work for the mixer if it was set in the vertical layout. I forgot you can do that when i made this. A different design would be needed for that, like for example, buttons with icons instead of text.
In regards to hidden items, the current Advanced Audio Properties menu could be retrofitted to be a Hidden Audio menu instead, which would also remove the need to search for hidden audio channels among non-hidden ones on the list.

 

[neilis]

This is a very nice project indeed, too bad not many paid attention to it. Hope you take it forward and we see it on some OBS update.

 

[AaronD]

There have been LOTS of ideas for how to improve the mess that is OBS's audio system. But because it *is* such a mess under the hood - with quick-fixes on top of quick-fixes, and things getting locked in that were written without sufficient understanding of what it's actually doing ("pure networking" mindset, compared to "live media", for example, so a buffer starts out good and then becomes uselessly long in response to the normal clock drift between the CPU and a self-clocked sound card...) - the devs seem to have stopped all active effort on that side, and are trying to figure out how to scrap and rewrite the whole thing instead.

Part of *that* problem seems to be that nobody on the team at the moment actually understands low-latency, real-time audio, so as to dedicate someone to "just do it" while the rest of them fight the other fires. So they're *all* fighting the other fires. Not worth making another mess out of ignorance, and not worth perpetuating this one either.

The major consensus seems to be, "OBS must not be a DAW!" And I completely agree with that!
(DAW = Digital Audio Workstation: a complete sound studio, all in one app. It only does audio, and it does it VERY WELL!)
There are enough DAW's already, both free and paid, that you can use one of those if you need that functionality. And they're amazingly complex all by themselves, hence the hard veto on making another one.

If something originates in OBS, send it directly from there to the external DAW, unprocessed in OBS. (Use OBS's Monitor for now, to do that, and send that Monitor to a loopback that the DAW can pick up. Do NOT send *any* of those to OBS's Output! "Monitor Only") Do EVERYTHING with audio in the DAW, including live sources and destinations, and one of those destinations is the final, finished stream mix for OBS to passthrough unchanged. (Another loopback, for a global source in OBS to grab, and it *only* goes to the stream. "Monitor Off")