Setting Up Multiple Audio Channels Channels in OBS Studio

I've been recording some gameplays for a while as an excuse to practice video editing. There are a lot of things to learn from the workflow standpoint.

I'm using OBS to record the sessions, as you do, and by default recording the desktop audio + microphone is easy enough. They are recorded to their own audio track so I can easily lower or increase my microphone audio during edits separately.

What if you're playing a multiplayer game and coordinating strategies with friends on Discord? Tweaking the volume of your friends separately from the desktop audio would be very valuable as well.

Let's see how we can enable multiple audio tracks per video.

But first, a warning: You'll need a fairly recent build of OBS to have "Application Audio Capture", which is still listed as a beta feature as the time of this post. This is how you can capture just the audio from Discord.exe. My test cases have been limited, but so far I have not encountered any issues with the feature.

Select Application Audio Capture and point it to Discord to record whatever your friends are yapping about.

Then, go to the application Settings menu and under the Output section, under the Recording subsection, enable the additional audio tracks, up to 6. Audio track is cheap file size-wise so I just enable all of them. This prevents me getting a situation where the track number is being used in the recording but not enabled, losing whatever was supposed to go in that track. Unused tracks will simply contain no audio.

Enable as many audio tracks as you need.

Back in the main program window, click the cogs to enter the Advanced Audio Properties. Here you will setup the audio tracks to their sources.

Set one audio track per audio source in the Advanced Audio Properties window.

In my case, I set my microphone to the track 2, Discord audio-only to track 3, and the game audio to track 4. I still leave the desktop audio track 1 as a fallback, as it captures everything. So if anything wrong happens in one of the other tracks I can salvage it during it. Be warned that if you check a track, but that track is not enabled in Output settings for recording, the record of that audio track will silently fail. That's just poor UX from OBS' part.

Note that I capture the game window, not the desktop window, this way things like desktop notifications won't show up in the video.

I also tick the Mono checkbox for audio sources that don't need stereo output, like my microphone and the discord audio. Sorry, per-ear ASMR fans.

That’s pretty much it. If you want to check the different audio tracks in a player like VLC you can go to the audio menu and change the current audio track being played there. But in DaVinci Resolve you have access to all of them as usual.

More tips on video recording/editing/streaming to come.

See you next mission.