Question / Help OBS wont take audio input from an audio interface

[mechangel]

So i'm using an audio interface to stream with and i can't get OBS to accept it as an audio input. I've tried making an aggregate device, using iShowU, etc. and can't get it to ever accept sound from the interface. I'm able to record to other programs, including DAWs and quicktime player, with no issue, but can't get obs to record the audio. The only way I was able to make it work was using Loopback to take the audio from the interface and make it run to iShowU, but I haven't found any free programs that are able to do that and don't know if i can justify paying for loopback. Is there any way to get it to work without 3rd party programs, and if no, is there any decent free alternative to loopback (other than using the trial version which makes me restart the app every 20 minutes or it adds a ton of white noise)