Streaming Live Music with OBS or Vmix and the Behringer XR18

if you find streaming high-quality multi-channel live music challenging with OBS or vmix then the behringer XR 18 may be just what you need this is the IP address let's get started [Music] [Music] hello my name is Ivan and this is the IP address what we're going to talk about today is the challenge that streaming high-quality multi-channel audio can be particularly with OBS and somewhat with V mix as well the behringer XR 18 is a well known it's an old mixer it's a small format digital mixer that has a lot going for it considering how much it costs but it has a couple of properties that are unique to it that may help mitigate some of the challenges with streaming live music with OBS and and again with V mix I'm gonna stay OBS but some of the stuff I'm speaking about also applies to V mix what is that challenge so when streaming multi-channel audio with OBS and I'm and glass a multi-channel audio I'm basically referring to live music above and beyond the need for say a singer/songwriter to have an acoustic guitar and a microphone where maybe one mic would suffice for both or each the vocals and the guitar separately miked so that's a two microphone or two Channel situation and OBS does just fine with that having said that if you want to break out of that to channel a limitation then you run into some problems now OBS does have an azo plugin that's available and I highly recommend that you install it if you're doing any kind of complicated audio you'll need that plug-in and it's much easier to use now that you no longer have to compile it if you do a search you'll you'll find it and it'll go to the website and you can download it and install it and so but there's still some limitations with what you can do even with the azo plug-in and one of the main problems is OBS when you use an audio interface without the plug-in only recognizes the first two sins which we will call USB 1 & 2 from the interface and so if you have something plugged in 2 3 & 4 & Beyond then you won't you won't be able to utilize that the other side of that is it is very difficult to obtain the final mix of an audio interface basically using that minute that interface as a mixer it's really hard to do that in OBS as well and so part of this is limitations with OBS and part of this is limitations with a lot of audio interfaces because they're not really set up to be mixers they're set up to be audio interfaces and that's where the bearings your XR 18 and the X 18 are a little bit different they have the ability to change the routing of their USB since the XR 12 doesn't do it the XR 16 doesn't do it but the X 18 and the XR eighteen both do and I believe that the X 32 series of mixers for bearings or anyway also can change their their matrix to such they could be used having said that the X 32 series are you know twice as expensive as an XR 18 which goes for about $600 new and you can find them used occasionally in the upper 400s maybe mid 500s and they're there they're pretty you know they're out there there should be easy to get at least new anyway and so what we're going to do is we're going to briefly talk about some of the features of the XR 18 and then we'll talk about why it can or how it can be changed with the i/o matrix and how it can be adapted to OBS and V mix to get much much better audio so here is the the behringer XR 18 and this is a kind of a front view of it there's really nothing on the backside or the sides except for the on/off switch and a fan port and one of the first things that you're going to notice about this mixer is basically it's fairly small I mean it's less than 19 inches wide and you can't install it with the rack using some rack ears that are that sometimes come with it at least when they're new maybe not you and then the other thing that you may notice almost right away is that you have 16 channels of input with XLR and these are the cool XLR Neutrik style connectors meaning that you can use both an XLR cable or a quarter-inch TRS cable and that that's just awesome additionally inputs 1 & 2 are high impedance connections so that gives you some flexibility and also there's two line inputs for quarter-inch connections and so that gives you a total of 18 inputs which again for a live band that's a lot of flexibility that's a three four piece kit I mean a three four piece band with a four five piece kit that you could easily mic up and get a very good mix that you can send to obs or the mix and I'll show you how to do that in just a second some other some other aspects of the XR 18 it's a 44 point 1 or 48 sample rate with a 24-bit depth it obviously doesn't come with you know built in faders and the way it's controlled is with a number of ways Windows and Mac have a desktop app and Android and iOS also have apps that you can use that connect to this either through a network connection or a direct connection like in the case of the X touch which is a hardware controller so again a lot going on here in terms of this small package and what it can do what I'm going to do now is bring up just kind of an overview of the mixer again I'm not going to go super in-depth this mixer has been well covered in other videos but just to kind of go through a few things in this view it's basically a normal mixer and so what my lost connection I'll just reconnect it's gonna ask me if I want to do from mixer to PC I'm just going to say yes and it'll kind of connect there and what we're gonna do is just kind of look through some of the parameters that we can change so this is an overview of the mixer itself standard affair faders it's got these blue lines here are the sins up here the channel gains and then what we can do is we can do a channel channel overview and here we see just an overview of what we can change here there's the input game the wastegate equalizer compressor pan and all that good stuff but there's you know this is just normal normal things if you want to get into more detail for example you can press on the gate and there's more gate parameters or if you want to dial the compressor in a little bit better there's options for that too and one of the great things about this unit is the fact that it's got built-in effect so it's the same effects processors from the x32 series and you get four slots and what that allows you to do is have multiple reverbs or delays so if you wanted to use one reverb for say vocals and a different one for guitars you would have that option you could have different delays again a lot of flexibility here and it works really well you know live but it also works really well for live streaming if I unmute these returns now you can hear the reverb and the delay and of course that's a lot but just to kind of show you let me mute those and go back I'm actually recording through the XR 18 right now so I could have a whole band miked up I could have keys bass guitar the whole thing and then we would send this to OBS or V mix and you would have a pretty good quality product there now it's not gonna this this unit is not the best audio interface there are certainly better audio interfaces out there in my mind this is a live mixer first and an audio interface second wear is a lot of times and it's the other way around it's an audio interface first impossible NIC's or second there are other companies that make audio interfaces that can double as mixers but I find that this one is probably one of the cheapest with the most flexibility now I said I was going to show you how to get this into OBS or V mix in such a way that you could take advantage of it as a mixer and what I mean by that is there are ways to do that with regular mixers but it calls for you know hardwiring something or possibly going from analog to digital and back from digital to analog again and when you use the XR 18 there's only one you know ad conversion you don't have to go back so once it goes into the digital realm it basically stays digital until the streaming process and you get the quality of a decent mixer so your only limitation at that point is going to be your bandwidth and what's in front of the microphone so there's nothing you can do about what's in front of the microphone sometimes but you know your bandwidth will be a limitation as well so let me show you what makes this a little bit different so this is the routing matrix from the mixer and as you can see where all the red circles are they are basically assigning you know different channels or outputs from the mixer to the USB sins back to the computer and so as it's set up now you could see that for example channel 3 is set to go back on USB 3 but what is great about this mix or if you look to the far right over here where it says left and right you can see these two circles and their mark left and right so that's the main output that's the final mix and that is being routed to USB 1 and USB 2 I can switch it over if I do this I'm gonna lose audio for just a second but I'll just show you how it's done so and that's just that easy if I had been speaking when the when I made the switch you wouldn't been able to hear me because I'm in fact on Channel four and again OBS and vmix will only recognize us be send one and two now with the Azio aspect and vmix has actually pretty excellent baked in azo abilities and with the azo plugin for obs yeah you can you can do other things but you're still it's still going to be kind of hard to get that final mix where you've been able to do per track EQ gate compressor levels individual mic gains and then be able to utilize those effects returns where you're basically getting a fully mixed you know left/right program that you can then shoot over to V mix or OBS which then in terms of course is sent to either whatever you're streaming to Facebook live or or YouTube live or what-have-you but that is what makes this particular unit I think so appealing it does address a lot of the challenges of you know streaming live music and what's interesting is this is I'm taping this basically during the coded quarantine and I'm seeing a lot of bands stream music on Facebook or YouTube and sometimes I can tell that the music's there and the talents there but the audio is just it suffers horribly and ironically video can be bad but audio cannot if the audio is bad it's just unwatchable which is you know kind of ironic so in any case this could be the way to address that there are other options for sure there's other mixers you could buy you could buy for example a digital mixer that's actually a free-standing mixer that then you could route through USB 1 & 2 they have USB outputs and you could do that and those are certainly options in there actually out there and they're apparently affordable they're also quite large and I think a little bit cumbersome and I love the fact with the XR 18 and the X 18 or any of the X 32 series mixers you can save your presets you can save the levels you can do scenes and snapshots in the light and basically you can take up where you left off and and just have your streaming situations set up and so I just thought I'd put this out there it's an old piece of kit again it's pretty common and easy to find and it may be like well I don't know for $5,600 is a lot to spend and it is I mean that's I'm acting like that's just you know chump change and it's not but if it's an option you can get a lot of mileage out of these mixers first of all you know it doesn't have to be used just for streaming they make great practice pas they make great live pas vans play through this because it because it can be controlled by an app if you notice it's got this antenna it makes a little local Wi-Fi network that all the musicians where the sound guy can basically log into this and and control the levels and things like that and so it's just you can get an awful lot of mileage out of this this mixer so I hope this was helpful I hope this would make somebody take a second look at this because I really like this idea if anything good comes out of this quarantine stuff it's I think that bands can really get out there and play live online with streaming in front of a lot of people that they may not they might not normally have access to and I you know again just trying to look for the silver lining during this mess but I hope that you know this will at least inspire you guys take a look at other options or this option if you have any questions just put them in the comments below I'll get back to you if I can answer it or at least get you heading in the right direction other than that this is the IP address my name is Ivan and thanks for tuning in [Music] [Music]

Channel: The IP Address

Views: 12,849

Keywords: vmix, obs, XR18, Behringer, streaming

Id: Ca6r37sjojQ

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020