Question / Help Noob need help with audio setup

[Jim Harrison]

I am streaming church services with two PTZ NDI cameras. The cameras and the computer are all on a single network. My primary audio source is our PA system connected to the PC through a USB port. However, I wanted to add an audience mic to catch the congregation signing along, instead of only hearing the signing from the pulpit. This second mic can't be connected to the PA system due to echo and feedback problems. Instead, I am feeding the preamp output from the audience mic into one of the PTZ cameras. The camera places the audio and video information into an Ethernet signal. This works great when the camera with the audience mic is selected. But when the other camera is selected, the audience mic disappears. I would like the audience mic to be live all of the time. I can't find anywhere in the OBS set up to make the audience mic appear in the mixer at all times. I am thinking of an inelegant solution, putting a Y-connect on the preamp output and feeding it into both cameras. This would add a little more hum and be a pain in the neck to wire. Is there someway to configure OBS to make that audio source available for more than just the one camera source?

 

[Narcogen]

Sure, although it may be non-performant.

Add the camera source that has that mic on it to every scene. In scenes where you're not using that video, push the frame for that camera out of view, onto the part of the canvas so it can't be seen.

This is non-performant because I believe OBS will still render that video, so on scenes constructed like this you will have increased load on your GPU.

Another way would be to just get a USB audio adapter and plug the microphone into that, and add it as a source of audio in Settings > Audio, which will make it appear in all scenes.

 

[Jim Harrison]

The USB adapter would require pulling an additional cable and a cheap piece of hardware, but would definitely work. This would be my logical next step if I can't solve the problem within OBS.

The idea of adding both cameras to the same scene is a little cumbersome. Is there some way that I could defeat the video from the second camera and only keep the audio, so that the video rendering would not bog down the computer?

 

[Narcogen]

No. You can't add a video device as an audio device.

If that feed was an NDI source I believe you could, but I have not tried that. I have only used it for video or audio-only sources, I haven't tried adding a video source as an audio-only source. But if you're not using NDI this wouldn't help anyway.

 

[DaniVork]

Hey guys,

Im in the same spot, but im having problem with the sound from the PA system. We heva a great system and such but when i listen to my stream it sounds just flat and bad quality. I tried just about every single setting in obs. What else can i look to?

Thanks,
Daniël