Tom Bruce Music

Live ambient with color added

Tom Bruce Music

Live ambient with color added

Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced streamer, a methodical approach to setting up and testing your gear will save you considerable time and trouble, and help to guarantee a successful show for you and for the community.  

We suggest that every artist very carefully test their gear in advance.   That should be the last step of a step-by-step process in which you carefully and deliberately do everything you can to make sure that your rig is working correctly, one thing at a time.   We describe that process here. 

We suggest that for configuration and testing purposes you use the simplest audio source that you possibly can — maybe a phone with a music player on it and an adapter cable that uses the same connectors that the cable from your live rig will.  There’s a reason for that: working with an easy-to-use audio source reduces the chances that it will be part of the problem, and it eliminates any possible distractions that might arise from problems with your performance rig.  Our motto is, “One thing at a time, dammit”.  You can’t put your full attention into solving problems with streaming gear if you’re thinking about how you want to nudge the filter on that patch you’re testing with.   

Repeat after me:  “One thing at a time, dammit”. 

Here are the steps:

  • Set up your performing rig to send ONLY a stereo pair of outputs for streaming.  Trying to send multichannel to an audio interface and then to OBS will end in tears (yours).
  • Set up your audio interface and connect it to your host computer
  • Make sure that you understand how any mixing software in your audio interface controls those inputs and outputs.
  • In particular, make sure that you know how your interface handles direct monitoring  — so you can turn it off before it starts lying to you.
  • Make sure that you understand how the inputs and outputs of your audio interface appear in the host computer you will be using to run OBS.
  • Configure OBS to take your audio feed
  • Connect your camera(s) to your host computer
  • Configure OBS to use your camera(s)
  • Do a simple recording with OBS (don’t worry about camera positioning or lighting or real audio, just see that it records video and audio, and play it back)
  • Do a simple stream test with Twitch (NOTE: for performances, you might use another service, but Twitch is easy to test with and there’s a lot more support available online)
  • Configure/arrange camera angle/shot(s)
  • Configure lighting
  • Make a recording with OBS and make sure you like what you see.
  • Do a livestream test with Twitch
  • Set yourself up to stream to the service you’ll use for your show
  • Take your “final exam” with a test using that service.

Making your rig stream-ready

This is probably a trivial problem for most of you — because most of you already send a stereo feed to the house system when you perform.   Good for you — and you should do exactly the same thing when you perform for a livestream. Send a stereo pair to whatever audio interface you’re using (one exception might be if you have a mixer that has a USB connection that is designed to act as an audio interface in its own right, which is somewhat beyond the scope of this document; ask me directly if this is your situation).

What you DON’T want to try is using an 8-in, multi-out audio interface to live-mix your performance.  I know it’s tempting.  It’s also a very bad idea for a number of reasons — in general, interfaces are not as easy to manipulate or control as real mixers are, and you’d find it hard to get good initial gain staging or to balance levels as you play.  Another problem is that while the OBS video streaming software could be set up to use more than a stereo pair for input, it is a huge pain in the neck and very hard to do.  So, keep it simple — mix your performance just as you would for a non-streaming show, and send the stereo result to the interface.

Setting up the audio interface

[ Editor’s note:  Having now struggled with writing this in a way that’s easy to follow and to do, I am pretty convinced that the best thing you can do if you’ve never streamed before is just go out and spend the $30 and buy a Behringer UCA-202 and the necessary cables to connect its RCA inputs to the output of your rig.  If your time is worth even 5 bucks an hour you’ll end up ahead, and be a lot happier.  Purists may disagree.]

Setting up an interface can be confusing — and the more inputs and outputs it has, the more confusing it gets.  If it has a software mixer built in, that can add yet another layer of confusion.  

The best possible case is that you’re using something dirt-simple like the Behringer UCA202.  It has two inputs, and two outputs, and that is all that it has.  You feed it stereo in, you get stereo out. When you look at how those inputs are labelled in your computer’s audio routing setup, they might be labelled a little cryptically — in the AudioMidi routing configuration app on my Mac Mini, inputs from the Behringer show up as “USB AUDIO CODEC 2” — but in the worst case you can always plug and unplug it until you figure out how the computer is labeling it.

On the other hand, the MOTU Microbook IIc that I use is a good example of the worst imaginable pain-in-the-butt complexity:

  • It forces you to use its internal software mixer, which has a terrible user interface.
  • The knobs and sliders on the software mixer are not labelled the same way as the actual physical inputs and outputs on the box are.
  • The outputs appear in the routing software on my Mac mini as sequentially numbered inputs (“input 1, input 2, input 3…”) with no clue as to how they correspond to either the physical inputs on the box or the labelling in the software mixer.

So, if you’re dealing with something like that, it helps to make a map.  I use spreadsheet software for this, in four columns: one for the hardware labels, one for the software mixer labels, one for the host computer labels, and one for notes (like, “this slider is really the thing that controls direct monitoring”).  Focusrite makes this a little easier for you  — their documentation usually includes a listing of the inputs and outputs in the same sequence that they’ll be numbered by your host computer. Others may do that as well, and it’s worth a look through the manual to see if they have.  Who knows — you might even strike it lucky and find that they tell you how the physical inputs map to that, and if so, your work is done.   Scarlett actually does a pretty good job of that on most of its models, and so does iConnectivity if you look in their support forums.

If the interface is poorly documented, you’re going to have to go through a fairly tedious process.  To map the physical inputs to the corresponding controls in the software mixer, plug your audio source into one of the inputs and send a signal.  Look for it in the mixer software by slider-moving or knob-twiddling.  Make a note of which slider controls the signal to that input.  Move on to the next input.  Lather, rinse, and repeat until you know which inputs correspond to which sliders.   They may even make it easy for you by labelling the physical inputs and outputs the same way in the mixer software that they do on the hardware itself.  MOTU doesn’t.  Record all this in your map.

Figuring out how the host computer sees the audio interface, and setting sample rates

Next, you need to figure out how the operating system on your host computer is labeling the connections to and from your audio interface.

  • If you’re running Windows, look in the sound setup dialog.
  • If you’re running OS/X,  look in Applications/Utilities/Audio Midi Setup. You should see your interface in the list of devices it offers.  While you’re there, set the sample rates for all the devices you’re using to the same rate. 44,100 will work very well for livestreaming.  If you have things where you have the option of setting buffer size, set them to 1024.  I know that increases latency, but for livestreaming you don’t care.  
  • If you’re running Linux, run 
    •  arecord  -l to get capture devices
    •  aplay -l to get output devices

Sample rates and buffer sizes for Linux are set either by whatever you’re using to start up JACK, or in alsa_in and alsa_out driver packages.  That’s pretty much beyond the scope of this document, but I can help if you like.

By the way, the reason to set all the sample rates the same, and the buffer sizes fairly large at 1024, is simply to reduce load on your CPU.  Most operating systems will now resample automatically when routing audio between devices with different sample rates, and it stresses the hell out of the CPU.

Install OBS

Here, we’re building on the valuable work that Jeremy DePrisco did for Cosmic Streamfest. Download the software here.  

Installation guides:

Configure audio and video in OBS. 

For Cosmic Streamfest, Jeremy dePrisco did a series of only-the-important-stuff guides for configuration.  Here they are:

A couple of observations about things that ain’t exactly intuitive:

  • You need to set the audio sample rate for OBS the same as you set all the sample rates in the last section.
  • Audio interface inputs show up in the “Mic/Aux” entries for OBS audio configuration, not in the Desktop ones (at least on OS/X)
  • Some (maybe all) versions of OBS only see the first two channels that your audio interface makes available.  If you need to work around this for some reason, you’ll have to do some audio-routing tricks that are beyond the scope of this document. 
  • OS/X Catalina has bugs that require that you start OBS from a terminal window.  See this post.

Pat yourself on the back. Or somewhere else. Then run a test recording.

The purpose of this test recording is not (yet) to record something fabulous.  It’s to make sure that both the audio from your rig and the video from your camera(s) are being recorded, and that the audio is clear (if you haven’t done anything about lighting yet, the video probably won’t be).   This basic tutorial covers installation (you did that already) and goes on to a simple and easy explanation of recording, without (yet) getting into the complexity of scenes and camera switching:

OBS Quick Start: How to Screen Record for Free With Open Broadcaster Software
Open Broadcaster Software Studio, more commonly known as OBS, is a video streaming and recording program. It’s free, open source, and fully cross-platform — Mac, Windows and Linux. When…

Do a quick Twitch test

You should already have obtained a Twitch account and set up your stream key in Twitch, but if not, do it now.  Then try sending a stream to Twitch and see how it looks and sounds.  It should sound great, and look, well, OK (looking great will only happen once you’ve paid some attention to setting up your shot or shots, and lighting them). 

Work on shot-framing and lighting

I cover this in a separate document.

Do a better Twitch test

Once you’ve got things looking like you want, run another Twitch test and see how it looks there.  Hopefully, great.  If not, tweak things and keep experimenting til you get something you like.

Good luck!

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