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:
Ableton Live 10 Standard (but this should work with just about any DAW)Focusrite 2i2 USB Audio Interface (this should work with similar interfaces from other manufactures)Open Broadcaster SoftwareASIO4AllVoiceMeeter
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.