Question / Help Mic sound yes, DAW sound no

[ditto]

Hi - just getting started.

I want to capture three things simultaneously - what's playing in my DAW, what's happening in the DAW GUI, and my voiceover via a USB headset.

With OBS, I can successfully capture the DAW GUI and the USB mic, but I haven't figured out how to capture the audio that's playing back in the DAW. I've tried all the options that appear in Audio Output, but nothing works. OBS is displaying my audio interface in a very simplistic way: "Speakers - Presonus Firestudio Audio" without any mention of various outs in the device. Is that the way it should be? Any ideas why I'm not able to capture playback sound?

 

[Cryonic]

Make sure that your DAW is using WASAPI (shared) or DWM, if you use ASIO (low latency driver for the specific Presonus interface) or ASIO4all it will NOT work since ASIO gives excluse access to the device and nothing else can work with it, even Windows itself.

The better way to do it is routing your DAW output (cue and/or master) to the line in on your onboard soundcard and make it work that way, so you keep the low latency in your DAW. As usual with a mixer or splitter or simply routing your master output via cable to the line in, while you work with the cue output on your headphones.

Everything else is a crippling workaround that will either cripple your DAW performance or the quality of the stream or cause audio issues and desync.

If you use a mac (anything with OSX), you can avoid that since Core Audio works just fine with multiple programs and low latency at the same time.

 

[ditto]

Thanks very much for replying - this stuff is new to me. I didn't know about the ASIO issue.

I tried routing my audio interface master outs via cable to interface line ins, but I just get killing feedback. Am I being stupid about this?

 

[Cryonic]

I would not say stupid, just make sure that you configure everything properly. Usually your DAW will use your audio interface and ONLY that, everything else (windows, stream, communication software etc) goes over to your built in soundcard. This is also where you plug your aux input that starts on the audio interface as master/cue out.
Feedback means you get the signal sowhere into your soundchain where it does not belong, check everything that could grab that signal.