Is Wave Link REALLY The Voicemeeter Alternative We Need?

this is the wave one this is a usb microphone from elgato and it is currently the cheapest way that you can get wavelink which is elgato's software for mixing all of your audio like your game audio your music discord think voice meter except instead of being bad it's good you all know voice meter i did a whole video explaining what it is and how to use it and let's face it voice meter is a pain in the it's confusing the ui is bloated it's got these weird labels that nobody understands so imagine if someone took voice meter stripped away all the features that 99 of streamers are never gonna use and then presented it in a way that you know actually makes sense that's what wavelink is so let's talk about it i'll show you a couple of ways that you can set it up and then we'll go into a few things that elgato can do to make it an even better product alright so let's make one thing very clear before you start this is a very sponsored video yes elgato did send me the wave one so that i could make this video plus they sponsored a few of my previous videos including this one and so for that reason it wouldn't be fair for me to call this video a review it's just impossible for me to be completely unbiased so i'm going to stray away from giving my personal opinion about how the wave one sounds that being said you have ears so just listen decide for yourself whether you like it or not you don't need me to tell you how to feel i don't know how to feel we'll start with the mic itself so the wave one is a really basic looking mic it reminds me a lot of other mics it has a knob on it you turn it the headphone volume goes up turn it the other way it goes down you can click into it to mute your mic and the back has a usbc port and a headphone jack so that you can monitor your stream it does have a swivel mount so that you can rotate the mic but the cable coming out of the mic interferes with the mount itself so that was a little bit weird i don't know why they did that it does have a desktop stance so that you can mount the mic but this thing is tiny get an actual stand elgato did just release two mic arms they have the standard wave arm and then they have the low profile wave arm and i tested them both out both of them are really good for getting your mic off of your desk and closer to your mouth so you can get better quality audio but if you already have a mic arm that you like it has standard threading so you can use pretty much any standard mic arm i'll leave a link down below to two other ones that i also use but that's really all you need to know about the mic now as for how it sounds i don't know you're listening to it you tell me i don't want to talk too much more about the mic you've already watched like the 40 000 other videos about the wave one let's get into the juicy stuff wavelength a big problem literally every streamer faces is audio specifically how are you gonna mix your audio like your game audio sound effects music discord here's an example let's say you wanted to listen to music but you only want that music to go into your headphones but not into your stream because you're afraid of getting like a copyright strike or let's say you're not me and you actually have friends and you're talking to one of them in discord and they keep talking about like you know their recreational prostate exams you might want to mute discord so your stream doesn't have to hear about how amazing your friend's weekend was this is what programs like aim to solve but as i said in the intro although it works it's really intimidating for a lot of new users to figure out and it's just really confusing if you watch my voicemeeter video you'll remember that i did this graphic to help you guys paint a picture of how it works so we're gonna do a similar graphic but this time for wavelink so that you can understand what it does and also the differences between that and voice meter so here's a big box and this box is special because you can plug a bunch of things into it those things are going to be all of the different audio sources that you want to control so things like your microphone your game audio voice chat your music sound effects and in total wavelength gives you 90 of these inputs which is really great on the other end will be two outputs the first will be what you hear in your headphones and the second will be what your stream hears through obs this big box controls where all of the audio goes so let's just say my microphone i want that audio to go to my stream but i don't want it to go to my headphones because i don't want to hear myself in my headphones but at the same time i want to listen to like i don't know what do kids listen to nowadays uh post milani yeah i want to take their music and just wrap that to my headphones but not have that go out to obs because i don't want my viewers to be able to hear it so the box that controls all of the audio this is what wavelink is and when you install it wavelink gives special names to all nine of these inputs but they all function exactly the same so there's no reason why you couldn't plug your game audio into like the sound effects input if you wanted to if you've used voicemeeter before all of these inputs are basically the same thing as vb cable you just get eight of them plus your microphone which totals up to nine inputs so that's a big picture overview of wavelink let's jump into the actual software so you can see how it works in practice so this is what wavelink looks like you're gonna see your inputs along the top at the moment we only have our microphone but if you click in the two you can see all of the different inputs that you can add these are the eight inputs that i was talking about before just add the ones that you want i'm gonna add maybe system then i'm gonna add music and then i'll add maybe game and then we'll add we'll add we'll add a web browser now you still need to link all your programs to each of the channels because wavelink has no idea that you want your chrome audio to go through the browser channel or spotify to go through the music channel so to change that you need to click on this button this is going to open up the windows app volume preferences normally this will be either your speakers or your headphones but we don't want that we want our audio going through wavelink now you're gonna see things like wavelength aux or wavelink music or wavelink a game but to me it makes most sense to put all of my system audio through to wavelink system so that's what i'm gonna pick and now you'll see if i start playing any audio inside of windows the system channel is gonna start moving up and down but i probably want all the audio for all my separate programs like chrome to be on their own separate channel right so i can control chrome audio independently of all my system sounds so i'm gonna go back into app volume preferences and i'm going to look for chrome i'm going to change the output for chrome and this time i'm going to set this to wavelink browser now if i bring up chrome and start playing a video and go back into wavelink you'll see that the browser channel is now moving but the system audio is completely separate so you just need to rinse and repeat for all your separate programs so if i go back to app volume preferences and let's just say i had spotify open somewhere here then i just have to go click in this and then if i wanted to go the music channel then i just search for wavelink music wherever the freak it is in this page but the point is once you have all your separate programs on separate channels then all you need to do is adjust the volume for each channel using each of these sliders now here's the cool part at the bottom you're gonna see your two outputs the first one your monitor makes is gonna be what you hear in your headphones and the stream mix is gonna be what your stream hears both of the meters are moving up and down because i have my system audio going through both outputs but if i wanted to mute my system audio to my headphones then all i need to do is click on this button and now it's only going out to my stream i can also adjust the slider so if i just want to make it quieter in my headphones then you can see the meter is only going up a little bit for the monitor mix but for the stream mix it's still full volume and then to top it all off if for some reason i want to hear exactly what my stream is hearing then i just need to click this weird looking little ear thing and now i'm hearing exactly what my viewers hear so you can see it's really easy to visualize your audio every single input has two different sliders the first one is going to be what you hear and then the second is going to be what your stream hears it's it's really simple now a couple cool things that i noticed that i didn't see mentioned in any other video number one there is nothing stopping you from adding another usb microphone and just adding it as another input here if you wanted to do that like this is my go xlr i can just plug my go xlr and it's coming as another audio input you still need to have a wave mic in fact you can't even open up the software until you have a wave mic connected and that second mic that you add actually can't be another wave mic because if you plug in two wave mics together that also doesn't let you start up the program which i found pretty interesting also this monitor mix here can be your speakers or your headphones i thought it had to be the headphone jack that's on the mic can actually be whatever you want so what about the obs side how do you set up the audio coming from wavelink inside of obs there's actually two ways i'm going to show you the intended way and then the nutty way the first is just to add an audio input device just like you would any other microphone and inside of the drop down select wavelink stream basically that just takes all of the audio that's coming out of the stream mix output and then outputting it through this audio input capture device basically all of the audio channels inside of wavelink are compressed into a single audio source that you manage inside of obs but there's a catch what if you wanted your music only to exist in your starting tune screen or you want to have your microphone muted for your starting tune screen or maybe your game audio will be louder in one scene but quieter for like your intermission scene or even better what if you want to add some filters to your microphone like eq or compression you can't do any of that because all your audio sources are compressed into a single source so you can't separate them out and you can't add eq and compression to your mic because then it's gonna add it to all of your audio sources that's where the nutty method comes in instead of adding wavelink stream to obs we're just gonna delete that i'm going to add a audio output capture then in the drop down box i'm going to add each of the wavelink browser wavelink game you know all of the audio sources that i'm using i'm going to do that for all of my wavelength audio sources so i got wavelink browser i've got wavelink sfx wavelink music and my wave one and now because all of our audio is added as separate sources within obs we've essentially relinquished control over audio to obs instead of wavelength i know that's not really the intended way to set up wavelength but you know i don't follow the rules who's gonna stop me you you think i'm gonna be stopped by someone named james get back to work james now wavelength is really awesome i think for 99 of streamers it completely eliminates the need for voice meter but it's not perfect there are still some things that i'd like to see added to wavelink the biggest one for me is nobody's gonna want to go inside a wavelength in the middle of their stream and start manually clicking these sliders to move them up and down look i know you can use a stream deck to do like volume up and volume down for each of the channels but i think it'll be way cooler if there's some kind of like slider on maybe a new stream deck or something just just an idea or maybe you can use the knob that's already on the mic to control the volume for different channels also the big one that a lot of people have been asking for is vst support inside a wavelength for your mic so that you can add eq and compression and it would affect your microphone like system-wide just so you guys know i have been informed by elgato that their next highest priority is adding vst support in a future update but you should never buy gear on the promise for future software updates you should buy gear based on what it can do right now and i guess one other thing that i personally would like is maybe an additional monitor mix and an additional stream mix for me sometimes i like using my speakers to listen to my audio and sometimes i like using my headphones and right now every time i want to put my headphones on i have to go inside the wavelength and then switch the monitor mix to my headphones and when i take them off then i have to switch back to my speakers i think it'd be great if it just had two monitor mixes and then i can choose whether to put audio through my speakers or my headphones but also twitch now supports two audio tracks one of the audio tracks will be what your viewers hear live during the broadcast but the second audio track will be specifically what gets saved to your vods i think if elgato added a second stream mix inside of wavelink that would be a really great opportunity to have a second stream mix that doesn't have any of your music that way if you accidentally play copyrighted music in your live broadcast it doesn't get saved to your vods this is one of the reasons why i personally prefer using the nutty method for setting up my audio but if they had two stream mixes i think that would be really useful for a lot of people anyway i don't know why i'm still up the the kookaburras are yelling right now i think that that means it's time for me to sleep so i think i'll leave it there guys thanks for watching links in the description box for the discord if you want to get any help you think i know how to do intros or they're called outros this is the worst outro in history i'm not it's too late i'm not redoing this i also stream on twitch three nights a week come see me there oh my god i'm so bad at this i already see him [Music] you

Channel: nutty

Views: 19,853

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Id: BVpS8KjxyCg

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021