OBS Studio: BEST Audio Settings for Streaming and Recording! [Ultimate Guide]

today I'm going to be showing you the best audio settings for OBS studio for your recording and streaming to take your audio quality from sounding like this which is still pretty decent to sounding like this with a nice full podcasty quality that we're all after these settings will work for male and female voices and I'll show you how to tweak them accordingly so without further Ado let's get started so to get started here we're going to go and add a microphone and you'll want to go in the sources tab um under whatever scene you're doing so right now I've got my game capture and then my screen capture just so you can see OBS but the game capture is the same we're going to go ahead and add this mic right here so to add a mic you'll go to the little plus button and then add audio input capture you'll be prompted with a screen to name it whatever you want to name it and then it should show you a screen like this where you can go ahead and select your device so it should probably be on default but then I'm just going to select my focus right solo audio interface which is powering my road nt1 condenser microphone for uh this video and that's the microphone I like to use and then you can just hit okay and that should add your microphone source and that should also show a source right here that's labeled the same name that you named this and you should see yourself talking you should see these bars bouncing around if you don't there's some other things you can try of just making sure it's working and your mic is on or it has phantom power or anything like that another thing you might notice is that it is mono only coming out of one ear on your headphones instead of two ears or only coming out of one speaker you can fix that by going into the settings making sure it's active obviously but then checking or unchecking this mono option you can see that right now if I uncheck it you'll probably only be hearing me in one ear but then if I check it it goes back to stereo because I'm doing two channels at monop pan left and right in my case so you can just check or uncheck that depending on if your source is mono or stereo that's a quick little fix for some mics that will default to mono and you'll be wondering why is it only coming out of one ear so now that we have our microphone set up here we can go into our settings and this is where we'll set some of the parameters here first go to audio and go to the sample rate this is really crucial to make sure that this number matches the sample rate of your audio interface or your microphone in my case it's 48 khz but the default is usually 44.1 khz for lower quality mics or just your desktop mic or phone mic or whatever the 48 khz is what my mic is at but if you have this number set wrong and you'll know it's set wrong because you'll start hearing a little bit of a delay or a difference in pitch in your vocals uh from what you actually sound like so if it's sounding a little weird you can go ahead and mess around with this number but we have to make sure that that's lined up with the number that our microphone supports after that we can go to the output Tab and then go over to audio and then we can select our audio bit rate on track one by default unless you set it to be any of these other tracks for your microphone but I usually like it around 128 it just works well for YouTube it requires a low bandwidth for streaming and everything but 160 also works really well 160 and 128 are both supported by many many streaming platforms I used to have it on 160 but I'm playing 128 just works pretty much as well so that's kind of up to you there obviously you'll make sure you're in the advanced output mode in order to see those features and once you have everything set there you can just hit apply and then okay and now we can get our microphone sounding really nice and full obviously mine does right now but I'll show you how I did it head over to your microphone that you added rightclick and by the way you can always go to properties if you want to change your microphone at any given point um but we're going to going to right click and go to filters this is where we add the magic so we're going to start with adding a gain filter and to add filters you'll just go down here to the plus and then you'll see gain right here or you'll see all the other filters that I use here I kept the names default just so that you can uh follow along with this you don't need to install any additional plugins or anything for this these are all just default installed when you install OBS studio so the gain here is to set our proper volume uh you'll notice that mine is plus 12 DB my mic is a little bit quiet so I need to raise the volume initially and to set the gain you'll want to just be talking and then start raising this or lowering it until your audio spikes are probably in this minus 15 area in the yellow here you can see mine are just touching the red but we'll set that later so when you set the gain initially make sure it's right in the yellow you know just in a nice little spot but not clipping too much then we're going to add a noise suppress pression filter and what this will do is just remove any background hiss or hum or fan noise or anything that's happening there um I have mine on good quality with more CPU usage because I have a higher end machine but you can uh try either of those and see what works best for you it just gives you a higher quality audio track and now we're going to add a three band equalizer our Three band EQ what this will do is just kind of emphasize or deemphasize subtract the tones in your voice that you like or don't like so because I'm a male with a slightly deeper voice I like to boost my low end just a little bit plus 2 DB I like to remove a little bit of the midtones just because they sound a little bit boxy or a little bit nasy and so I don't like them as much for my voice and then I like to give a little bit of a boost to the highs plus 3 DB just so that you can hear my S's and T's and higher sounds more clearly so my pronunciation still sounds really good and it doesn't sound too washed out and then if you're a female or with a higher voice you may not want to do this low-end boost you might just keep that at zero probably just keep your midtones at zero and then just do a subtle high-end boost and that'll sound pretty good for the higher voices but if you do have like higher quality headphones or speakers that have a base or subwoofer um and you do have a deeper voice it's sometimes nice to add a little warmth into the voice by increasing the lower end after that you'll set a expander and what this does is basically limits the frequencies that can uh pass through so it will take out the unwanted frequencies and our goal here is to set it to be just the frequency of your voice so make sure it's set to expander instead of gate up here make sure the ratio is 3: 1 that's a nice ratio just to roll it off nicely I'm not going to go over the big nitty-gritty tech specs of that I produce music and everything so some of these numbers you know if you if you're interested you can uh go and look out more tutorials of why ratios matter or what it does um and then we'll deal a threshold in a moment here we're going to set a really fast attack of 1 milliseconds um and then a release of 100 milliseconds and an output gain this is again where you can just mess with this slider a little bit I usually have it at least what my gain is so you know around 12 there so I'd set it to be around 12 but I boosted it just a little cuz I liked the sound that I got out of the expander then this threshold is the main thing that we're going to mess with once you've set all the rest of these the threshold is where it will limit the frequencies to only let your voice pass through so in my streams for example I have a dog and she loves to bark really loudly every time someone will open the door or even when someone opens the door makes a nice little squeaky sound and the latch closes whatever and you guys probably can't hear that you know there's been a couple cases where you can before I dialed in these settings but it will Limit Out The Unwanted frequencies and make a nice quiet background and just let your voice come through which makes a really clean voice so the threshold you'll notice if you set it all the way up you won't be able to hear yourself at all it's eliminating every single frequency so you'll put it all the way up and then start slowly dialing it back down until you can hear yourself clearly um or you can see these audio spikes kind of in the in the 15 again or whatever uh you'll start slowly dialing it back down and then in my case I like it to be pretty low because I don't want to eliminate too much of my pronunciation or too many frequencies you can see if I start raising it up it'll start just sounding a little bit you know the beginning of my sentences might be cutting off a little bit my P's or something might not be sounding quite as good so I like to just bring it down to around -50 6 that's good for me um for my mom as well I helped her set up her podcasting setup and in her case she could get away with the slider being slightly higher um because she had a just a higher female voice not as many frequencies and so this this slider location will be dependent on your voice um if you want a little bit of help with that as well let me close out of this you can click the settings here and then you can see on your mic you have this option called uh audio monitoring you can select this and then you can um you can monitor and output um so then if you select that you'll be able to hear yourself talking through your headphones and that's how you'll know kind of where to set that slider which can be helpful sometimes I usually just look at it or do a couple test recordings and see how it sounds but you can set that direct monitoring to be on so back in the filters here once you've set the settings for your expander we will add a compressor and this does exactly what it says it will compress your audio to basically lower down the volume of when you shout or do a sudden plosive or things like that so that it doesn't sound all distorted and clipped and it will just slightly raise the volume of the quieter tones uh just to even out your voice and get a really really nice sound so again we'll set a 3:1 ratio which is just a good General ratio works for everyone and then we'll set the threshold this is this is what is again really important on the compressor uh so we'll get to that in a minute but set the attack of 1 milliseconds again nice and fast you don't have to have it quite that fast but I like it fast uh just gives a nice Punchy sound to my vocals which I like for uh voiceovers and things um and then the release is 60 milliseconds and then output gain I did not mess with that but if you do want more gain you could you know you could mess with that slider I think my voice is plenty loud enough so I'm not going to add more gain uh I just set that in the gain tab so then the thres threshold is where you're going to notice the big difference you can see if I start lowering it my vocals will get much quieter they're very very compressed it's not just taking the loud stuff off it's just keeping my volume super boring and it's not quite a good sound you can see if I have it all the way up it's not compressing at all my vocals sound all distorted and way overblown and way too loud so we're going to start dialing it back I like mine at aroundus 14 DB or whatever toward it's just going to start hitting that top end and this is where we make that transition from uh yellow to Red it's okay to see it going in the red a little as long as your compressor is doing its work that'll give you a nice loud volume but still a very clean sound without being too distorted that's the purpose of the compressor here and then once you're done with that you can add a limiter you don't have to add a limiter but it just adds that little bit of touch at the end just to boost the overall volume and again limit the very very peak of your uh of the really high waves in your audio file um so the threshold I just like to barely barely limit that Peak off the top so the super super loud parts of my audio assuming that I screamed in my streams or things which I don't really but uh you can just kind of set a really high threshold just to clean it up a little more and then the release of 60 milliseconds so with that said I hope you've learned something from this tutorial on how to set some nice audio settings to get a really clean sound for your streaming or recording in OBS studio if you have any additional questions be sure to comment them down below also join my Discord server through the link in the description and I will answer all of your questions in there but I hope you learn something from this be sure to subscribe and like the video if you did and I will see you in the next one cheers

Channel: Chiselchip

Views: 38,038

Keywords: obs studio tutorial 2023, obs studio settings, obs studio settings for low end pc streaming, obs studio streaming tutorial, obs studio recording, obs studio recording settings, how to record with obs, how to stream with obs, best settings for streaming obs, best recording settings for obs, obs studio setup, obs studio guide, obs, obs studio, obs studio tutorial, chiselchip, best obs settings, best obs settings for recording, obs studio audio settings, best audio settings obs

Id: mCjo85MuD5A

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023