Master Stereo Audio Out Channel?

Skye4

New Member
Hi. Could anyone help with setting up a master stereo audio out channel? I'd like to have a master audio out with a master limiter/comp etc with a db meter. Is this possible in Mac Sonoma ? Thank you.
 

AaronD

Active Member
Unfortunately, OBS doesn't do that on any OS.

It *would* be nice to have, and a lot of people have asked for it already...but OBS's audio is a practically unmaintainable mess at the moment. It does what it does, and we just have to understand what that is and isn't, and work around that.

Trying to fix it at this point is like some of the software projects I've had at work, where I could see an original good design underneath a giant pile of band-aids and quick-fixes that were never cleaned up but just piled on more. Change one little thing, and something else breaks because it depended on that exact functionality. Fix that, and something else breaks for the same reason. And so on throughout the entire codebase.

By the time I finally made everything work like it needed to for the project at hand, I'd spent the same amount of time as it would have to completely scrap and redo the whole thing from scratch...except I'd only added a few more band-aids to the existing pile.

The Engineering world calls that "Technical Debt", and it does need to be "paid off" or cleaned up from time to time. That's one of several reasons behind major, big-deal, backwards-incompatible releases. So far, OBS hasn't done that.

The devs know all of that already, and so the last I heard, they're working on what they want to do from scratch. What exists now is probably not going to be fixed or changed at all.

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In the meantime, the way to satisfy your request is to use an external tool to do ALL of your audio work, so that OBS becomes silent except for a final, finished soundtrack that it passes through completely unchanged.

That external tool is usually a physical console that feeds a physical line input to the PC, or a DAW that feeds a loopback. Either way, connect all of the audio things (mics, speakers, etc.) directly to the external tool, not OBS, and do ALL of your audio work in there, not in OBS. So OBS really is completely silent except for that one finished soundtrack that it shovels straight through.

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That's the mindset that most professional workflows have anyway: picture and sound are completely separate things with completely separate tools, that are only brought together at the very last moment before the final output. The video tools are silent, and the audio tools are blind.
 
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