I've spent a lot of time during the build-up of my channel and social media presence and
things like that trying to establish the fact that I'm not people's personal tech support.
I'm a content creator first, not a tech support agent.
Especially when so many companies have dedicated tech support... you know... employees that
are paid to do this and really good at their jobs (or at least decent at their jobs).
This video is kinda gunna work against me in that regard because today’s video is
potentially the start of a new series here on the channel where I take a look at my discord
server’s tech support channel - we have a whole channel for tech support over there
where you can join, it's free, ask questions and get answers from the community (sometimes
I chime in) things like that - and we'll cover the most interesting problems submitted by
members over the past week or month or whenever this series regularly appears.
And kinda showcase the solutions.
If you need help with OBS, cameras, audio, or just want to nerd out on some tech goodness,
be sure to join my Discord server at EposVox.com/Discord or with the link below.
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First up, Cap (or Capp00) wanted to have each of his audio devices in OBS record to different
tracks, but couldn’t figure out why his stream was only getting one source instead
of all of them combined.
This is actually a fairly common problem - people either have all of their audio on all tracks
and wonder why it's not separated, or separated evenly and wondering why their stream is only
getting one of their devices - as most people don’t realize OBS can only use one audio
track for streaming.
Because streaming is a 1-track thing, it only takes whichever audio track you tell it in
your streaming encoder settings.
So when recording you can have up 6 separate tracks recorded to individual basically audio
files in your final video file that is separated in your video editor.
But When streaming, you can only select one of those 6 tracks for what your viewers hear
that goes to your streaming service - Twitch or Mixer or YouTube or what have you.
The workaround, as suggested by HunterAP (one of our moderators by the way), is to put all
the audio devices on one track - that is track one - and then also have them separated on
tracks 2 through 6.
This is what I personally do, as well.
Track 1 is dedicated as your Twitch mixdown track where all of your devices that you want
heard (you can have devices that you don't want heard not on that, but all of the ones
you want heard) on that first track, and the rest are separated for editing and you just
mute out that Twitch track during your actual edit for your recorded copy.
This way the stream gets sent all of the desired audio, and they’re still separated out for
editing.
This is also useful if you’re just recording footage as it gives you one “master” track
with all your audio, and then safety tracks with everything separated out for mixing later.
If you do need to mix or remove your music channel or something like that later on.
-
Our second issue this week comes from jrseliga, (or j-r-seliga.... sorry) who wondered if
wireless headphones and microphones will work with the analog output of a mixer.
Most high-quality wireless headphones use either Bluetooth or radio frequencies to transmit
audio from a transmitter connected to or serving as your audio source, with a receiver embedded
in the headphones or microphone itself (depending on what you're using).
Bluetooth is generally less than ideal due to latency involved with the transmitting
process from your phone or computer (things like that), but recent revisions of it have
significantly reduced this, making watching movies or listening to music a bit more of
a decent experience, to the extent that the smartphone market has gone almost exclusively
headphone jack free now - which is frustrating to me, to say the least.
More high-end headphones from the likes of Sennheiser use a radio signal transmitted
from a dedicated charging dock to send audio to the headphones.
These are generally pretty reliable, but you can expect to pay extra for it.
Both Bluetooth and the more high-end Sennhesiers can use analog sources.
With Bluetooth, you need a dedicated transmitter connected to the mixer, and either Bluetooth
headphones that can pair to it, or a second Bluetooth receiver plugged into an existing
set of wired headphones.
The Sennhesiers generally have an analog input on the charging dock, so they pretty much
plug and play.
As for microphones, aside from expensive professional options, your best bet is the mod mic wireless.
I’ve done a full review of it in the past, and it’s my go-to recommendation for people
that want a clip on, headset-style, microphone, without needing extra cables.
Really though, it’s best just to use wired headphones and mics, especially if you’re
streaming or need a reliable audio solution.
Wireless is convenient until a battery dies or you lose a connection, then it becomes
a headache that wired headphones would never give you.
-
The final tech support topic of the week comes from Derek who was having a nasty bandwidth
issue when trying to stream with SLOBS.
Regardless of what bitrate he tried using, his stream would immediately throttle to 34kbps
second, causing it to stutter and continuously restart.
At first, we thought the issue might be his internet connection.
Perhaps he wasn’t getting the upload speed his ISP advertised?
This is a common issue thanks to the current FCC administration’s stance on Net Neutrality.
Many people, especially in rural areas, only have access to DSL or comparably slow internet
connections.
Even people that do have access to fast internet often find themselves getting speeds lower
than what they pay for.
Fortunately for Derek, that didn’t seem to be the case.
Multiple speed tests confirmed he had a reliable internet connection.
Next, we tried changing the Twitch ingest server both manually and using the OBS setup
wizard.
No dice here again.
Finally, it was suggested that Derek disable any QoS or quality of service settings on
his PC, modem, and router.
In an ideal world, QoS acts as a load balancer for everything trying to use your internet
connection.
But more often than not, it seems to just arbitrarily throttle your connection.
As it turns out, that’s exactly what was happening to Derek.
THANKS QUALITY OF SERVICE!
Disabling QoS across all of his devices fixed the issue.
He can now stream to his heart’s content😉
And that’s it for today’s episode of Tech Support or Technical Support - I'm not really
sure what we'll be calling it, or if it will even be a recurring series.
If you have a tech support question, or just want to talk about nerd stuff, be sure to
check out my discord linked below.
(maybe add some fluff about what viewers can expect on
the server here like community, people to game with, etc.)