HOWTO: Capture ASIO audio in OSB on Windows FOR REAL THIS TIME!!!

Ok so a couple of days ago I wrote a post describing how to setup OBS and Ableton using ASIO4All and VoiceMeeter to try and capture audio output and stream it. That worked…as long as you had no intention of trying to play an instrument along with the audio you were hearing at the same time. So forget all the stuff me from three days ago wrote and instead use my new and improved version.

My Setup:

So as before run through your normal installation of Ableton, OBS, and the official drivers from Focusrite (or whom ever created your hardware interface).

Download the ASIO plugin for OBS Studio and follow the instructions on getting it installed.

Once you are done with that visit the ODeus ASIO Link Pro site, download the software and the patcher and install them.

Still with me? Ok…let’s do this.

Ableton Setup

In Ableton under Preferences -> Audio we want to select ASIO Link Pro as your audio device.

This will open the ASIO Link Pro window. If it prompts you to pick a driver select the ASIO driver provided by your hardware manufacture. In this case I selected the Focusrite USB ASIO driver.

The first time I saw the ASIO Link Pro setup screen it looked like this

The instructions for this amazing piece of software is a bit….well I didn’t find any so I fumbled around a bit. To save you all the time we need to make a couple of quick modifications.

  • Draw a line from ASIO DRIVER OUT MIX 1 -> NETWORK OUT 1
  • Draw a line from ASIO DRIVER OUT MIX 2 -> NETWORK OUT 2
  • Under NETWORK OUT check Enable Connection

When you are done you should have a configuration that looks like this:

You can verify things are working by starting to play something in Ableton and all the boxes should start animating.

You should be hearing sweet sweet audio out of your hardware interface and now it is time to switch over to OBS.

In the Sources box in OBS we want to add a new ASIO Input device with the following selections

  • Device -> ASIO Link Pro
  • OBS Channel 1 -> ASIO Link Multiclient 0 LinkIn1
  • OBS Channel 2 -> ASIO Link Multiclient 1 LinkIn2

A new window for ASIO Link Pro should open up but this time instead of our Focusrite driver the driver selected should be ASIO Link Multiclient.

We want to make the following configuration changes

  • Network In -> Enable Connection
  • Draw a line from NETWORK IN 1 -> ASIO HOST IN MIX 1
  • Draw a line from NETWORK IN 2 -> ASIO HOST IN MIX 2

It should look something like this when you are done.

You’ll know it is all working when you start playing audio out of Ableton and OBS lights up like a Christmas tree.

There you have it. Low latency audio captured clearly, and you didn’t have to pay Apple a dime.

HOWTO: Capture ASIO audio in OBS on Windows

UPDATE: Me from 3 days ago didn’t know what he was talking about. Don’t read this post at all. I mean it, seriously, don’t. Instead read my updated instructions here.

I keep telling myself that in 2021 I’m going to make more music and to stream it on my Twitch channel. So yesterday I spent some time trying to figure out how to capture audio from my DAW so that I could ultimately route it to OBS. I’m leaving this post here partially because I didn’t find decent instructions and figured others had the same questions but mostly as a note to my future self.

My setup:

My instructions below will focus on Ableton, but I’m guessing that the configuration in just about any other Windows DAW will be very similar, so lets get to it.

Starting off go through your normal installations for Ableton, OBS, ASIO4ALL, and VoiceMeeter.

In the Ableton go to Preferences –> Audio and select the ASIO4ALL v2 audio device.

Once you’ve selected the ASIO4ALL audio device check out your system tray, there should be an icon for the app’s control panel. Open that up and then click on the Advanced Options button. In the list you should find both your audio device (in this case my Focusrite) and an entry for VB-Audio VoiceMeeter VAIO. There should be a plus icon next to both, we want to expand them. The configuration we are ultimatly looking for is to have both the hardware device and VoiceMeeter enabled, but on the hard ware device only the IN enabled and on VoiceMeeter only the OUT enabled. Mine happens to look like this.

In VoiceMeeter I selected my Focusrite as the Hardware Out device.

Finally over in OBS the mix out from Ableton should be captured as part of the Desktop Audio.

Here’ you can see I’m capturing audio from my DrumBrute and MiniBrute 2S fed through the Focusrite. Because we are still using ASIO drivers we can take advantage of Ableton Link (if that’s important to you) as well as any post processing you’d like to do on the audio captured via your hardware device.

Disclaimer

I’m pretty sure that this adds latency but it should be far less latency than switching over to MME/Direct X driver.

Hopefully you found this useful. If you did leave a comment to say thanks, it’ll at least tell me that the Google search gods are smiling my way.