oh welcome to the video i'm machine dana i hope you did really really well in this
video we're going to learn how to add a audio visualizer to your obs
studio stream if you're a streamlabs user you probably clicked on this by accident but i'm
going to do a separate version of this for streamlabs obs when i've done that i will
link it in the description below so there's a good chance when you watch this that will be
linked in the description below this is the first video in a three-part series that i'm going to do
about audio visualizers the first one this video here is going to be how you can simply
add and configure an audio visualizer to show the waves and the waveform the cool effects of
the audio on your stream the second video will be how you can beautify that and make it look
like awesome on your stream by adding masks and gradients and colors and things like that and
shading the third video that i'll do will be how to add the artwork and the name of the artist if
you're using spotify i think it works like itunes as well but i will link all three videos in the
link in the description below which is the stream labs video the beautification video and the adding
the album artwork audio visualizers are pretty awesome they just look awesome on your stream they
make a big difference too like the aesthetics of your stream they're a little bit more interactive
i finally work really well for like intermission type screens and also like a be right back or a
starting soon type of screen as well obviously you can use the audio visualizers how you see fit but
my personal preference is to use it in that way if you find this video useful definitely appreciate
a like on the video because that helps me and also if you can just comment and let me know
if it went well for you if you found it useful and all that kind of stuff any problems you had
it's really useful to know it helps other users to see what issues they may have had when they
added this but i'll try and cover those issues within the video of course also you're more than
welcome to check out my twitch stream at twitch.tv forward slash machine dana let's get into this
okay so this first video is how to add the audio visualizer we're going to go into
spectralizer on the obs project page searching for this particular plugin the current version
is 1.3.4 i'm sure the version will have changed by the time you watch this they're pretty stable
product they've been going for a long time it looks like this version is actually october 2019.
i will link both the project page for this plugin and also the code here as well on github i'll also
link below an instruction video on how you can install plugins because i don't want to cover
installing plugins in this video once you've installed spectralizer that gives you access
to a new source within obs studio so you can click the plus button here and add spectralizer we can
give it a name this is where we'll configure that spectralizer so here in this video we're
going to go through all the detail of this that you can do like the foundations of the audio
visualizer and the next videos will be about how you can then make them look beautiful and
then the third video adding the artwork and of course the titles and stuff like that all we've
got here for now is like a sort of standard background maybe this is like an intermission
type background or in this case looking for game capture so it's already registered the source in
the top left and we can do the resizing bit later but now we're going to put some music
on for this next section so you can actually see this in action you can first of all choose the
mode which is bars circular bars or a wire and just to show what that looks like we can
choose an audio source so i'm going to choose the desktop audio which will capture any audio
that's coming through into my headset but you may have like separate lines for different audio
you just need to select the line where you want the audio to come from i.e the music audio i'm
assuming you want this as music but you could even select it as the the microphone in case you wanted
an audio visualizer for your microphone so and just to illustrate this is what the bars look like
this is what the wires look like and the circular bars come out from a circle which you can adjust
so i'm going to select the desktop audio here straight away we can see it's cutting out my audio
but it's brought in the music audio and it's completely ignoring my microphone but just bear in
mind here if you're playing a game and you've got your music coming through the same audio source ie
for example your desktop audio it will pick up the game elements on the audio visualizer so if you
are using this on like a live screen scene it will capture both so i'd recommend trying to split out
the audio for those two things for example if you have a mixer and you're able to do that kind of
vibing out to this music the filters just defines like the sort of the shape of the audio visualizer
whether it's more elongated like big waves or whether it's like little spiky bits you've got
the monster cap filter and the sgs filter don't ask me what they mean because i'm not an audio
nerd i can't answer your question all i know is one looks good the other one looks different okay
so there's the monster one inch as you can see it's kind of like they're almost like connected
the bars are like connected together whereas on the sgs filter it's a lot flatter so the bars are
even more connected to each other and there's less protruding bars if you put none on this
goes really almost like not random but like the bars are not particularly connected to each other
so i'm going to go with the monster cap filter because i think that's quite cool it's like a
good middle ground between the two but you may you may prefer this smoother filter one like this
now we're just going to go into some of the settings for this and by the way each of these
filters has different settings as you can see here the settings pop out let's go in the monster cap
so let's first have a look at the strength of the filter
turning this right down does something a little bit like that so if you wanted like
a flat waveform of like a boombox type of audio visualizer and that would work really really well
or maybe if you wanted something somewhere between the two but i don't i actually want some
i want this to go across my whole screen so i want there to be quite a lot of different waveforms
throughout the audio visualizer i'm going to try 130 but again we can tweak and change this and
again a lot of this is personal preference we can now just choose like a basic color here if we want
so from the audio spectrizer app can't choose a basic color but the second video will go into a
lot more detail about how you can make more and make it really stand out and pop so let's just
select a color so that's a little bit different now we can select the bar width so let's try
smaller bar width and also the bar height we might want to make it higher let's say i keep let's say
120 so that's added a further height and thinned out the bars which i think looks kind of cool but
again you may decide you know what i actually want the height to be a lot lower and go with 50 and
maybe like you want little chubby bars like little fat chubby bars like that it's up to you it's like
magic you just do what you want the reason why i want the bars to be quite high like this is when
you get like the bases and the the snare drums you'll see that spike of audio visual it looks
pretty cool now we can choose the bar spacing so this is pretty cool because we've defined
further down here how many bars we want there's 32 bins so there's 32 bins they're called bins
like audio nerds technical speak it's called a bin but i'm calling them bars because they
are actually bars let's say you want the spacing to be something like 10
you'll see that spaces them out quite a lot that gives you a lot of flexibility here
to do something completely different we can see what it looks like as a preview here game we can
resize this i actually don't want to have much of a spacing so i'm going to keep it like this
now i want a little bit more than that so i'm going to go with three
i'm fairly happy with how that looks for the time being now we'll talk about automatic scaling so
automatic scaling if you click automatic scaling it'll then basically scale the high points of the
song and the low points of the song and it'll put the bars sort of somewhere in the middle but you
can sort of hard code settings to do like certain heights and and depths the danger with that is if
you change the volume of your music or if you play really different styles of music on your stream
certain settings may not catch to the high volumes or the low and you get stuff like
this happening where in this example where it's quite a high beat high tempo the bars are always
high rather than always low i'm gonna actually just leave that on automatic scaling because
the plugin here does a pretty good job of understanding the music and then scaling
that up properly we can now choose to go stereo which will add uh top and bottom to it there's
almost like a line through it so if you wanted an effect where it's a single audio visualizer like
that you can do that it looks pretty cool you can also choose to have a logarithmic scale as well
and all logarithmic does is like it goes exponential sounds so exponential sounds
if the sound increases by double the size of the bar won't be double it'll be exponentially
higher than that so that's why you're seeing here in the example the bars in certain
audio frequencies are much higher than the ones in different frequencies
so we can even change the frequency scale to change the hertz level where it scales
i'm just going to turn logarithmic off i don't actually like that effect i don't really like
the effect but you may so that's the beauty of this it's all in the eye of the beer holder
the gravity level gives like hyper pills to your audio visualizer you might imagine if
you imagine if you tried to dance with double gravity you'd be like bobbing up and down a lot
more or if you were trying to dance in space it'd probably look a little bit more like
like that a little bit more like soft that's what the gravity is i don't know what the default was
here and now we just need to define how many bins we want now i'm going to having this
i think i think what i'm going to do is add this on a north south top to bottom
so i'm going to have maybe like 120 pins here and because i'm going to be stretching this out
quite far so i'm going to click ok on that we now have a basic audio visualizer for our stream okay
i can now right click on this and transform it for instance by rotating it 90 degrees clockwise
for instance transforming it and putting it on the left of my screen or something like that
so there it is i've been able to add a simple audio visualizer to my stream it's in tune
with the audio settings that i've chosen in this case the music it's been quite highly customized
to what i want that to look like including the waveforms the frequencies the gravity uh
yeah hopefully you guys have found this useful if you have check out the second one in the series
below where we make this look really awesome on your stream remember this isn't about just adding
it to your stream it's about people coming to your stream seeing it and thinking wow this is awesome
this guy knows what he's doing and even though we know you don't have a clue what you're doing
don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll see you guys in the next video