The Audio Engineer’s Guide to Live Sound Management with OBS: Maximizing Your Broadcast Quality

How to Balance Your Stream Sound with OBS Audio Ducking?

Benjamin Arango

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

Video making or filmmaking has now come to the level where the history of imperfections faded away a long time ago. Yes, while the animation is still ruling the floor, an inevitable back-end process might look off-screen and a little complicated. One such job is ducking sound that is the process of balancing voiceover and the background audio. If you aren’t a tech-savvy person, I hope to go in-depth isn’t needed, and hence we stop here. To depict how you need to work out this ducking music process, we have this post.

If you are a content creator, maybe you will be familiar with coordinating the right audio with the video. If not, it isn’t a problem anymore as I have included a detailed guide of implementing audio ducking in a step-wise way. With primary importance to the popular software OBS followed by a suitable alternative, let’s begin our article!

Part 1: How to Balance Your Stream Sound with OBS Audio Ducking?

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open-source software reliable for Windows, Linux, and macOS 10.13+. With countless features like real video/audio capture, mixer, custom transitions, easy-to-use configurations, pre-source filters, VST plug-in support, noise suppression, and a lot more, you can accomplish audio ducking in OBS by adding a sidechain/ducking compression filter. Thus, perform OBS audio ducking in a clean manner by lowering the audio automatically once OBS detects audio on the other audio source.

Does this magic of OBS audio ducking seem new to you? It will not be anymore as the below step-by-step manual will guide you through the process.

Step 1: Add video files

Launch the OBS software on your system, and import the files into the workspace with the “File” menu. If you need to add voiceover from your microphone, you can click the “Start Recording” option under the main interface’s control section.

If the video plays on VLC in the background, it will appear on the mixer column.

Step 2: Choose filter and compressor

On the Settings icon next to the streaming video, click on it, and choose the “Filters” option from the drop-down.

You will reach the pop-up of the “Filters for Desktop Audio” whereby clicking on the “+” icon, choose the compressor option.

On the space bar, enter a name for the filter. For example, for ducking music, specify as “ducking,” and press “OK.”

Step 3: Change the parameters

You can now specify the values of the ratio, threshold, attack, release, output gain, and the ducking source, for example, “Mic” for microphone voiceover addition.

It’s complete. Yes, OBS audio ducking is over. Now you can check the video and alter the parameters if required after a preview.

Part 2: The Best Audio Ducking Alternative to OBS

Although OBS is preferable for being an open-source and free option with comprehensive abilities in video recording and live streaming strategies, the OBS ducking interface might seem a little unfriendly, making it difficult for newbies. Hence, we have come up with Wondershare Filmora in this session as the best alternative to Streamlabs OBS audio ducking. With an intuitive easy-to-use interface, and attractive video/audio features, Filmora stands as the recommended choice for professionals and beginners!

Developed for the inspired, Filmora follows its unique way of ducking sound, easy to handle for travel Vlogs, makeup tutorials, video lectures, presentations, and so on. Going through the below feature set can reveal why is Filmora is better than OBS.

• With simple steps, you can perform audio ducking in just on a single scale to attain the right audio balance on your video without complication.
• Get access to other in-built options like noise remover, after effects; fade in/out, equalizer, keyframing, and so on.
• Perfect your audio to the video along with tons of features like an audio mixer along with options like mute, detach, split, and background removal.
• Add voiceover, sprinkle magic with filters, detect beat, and create markers easily with Wondershare Filmora.

How to use the audio ducking feature in Wondershare Filmora?

Download and install Wondershare Filmora by clicking on the Try It Free button above. Once installed, follow the steps below.

Step 1: Launch the application

Open or launch the Wondershare Filmora application and choose “New Project“ or open the existing project from the primary dashboard.

Step 2: Import the video into the timeline

Drag the video file to which you need to balance the stream sound.

Another option to bring the video file into the timeline is by executing “File> Import Media> Import Media Files”.

Step 3: Ducking sound in the video

Select the clips with dialogue, whereby right-clicking or double-clicking on them, choose the “Adjust Audio” option.

On the following audio editing window, tick the “Lower the volume of other clips“ option to reduce background music or any other media volume.

Conclusion

I hope you have now come to know why ducking sound is a must and how well Streamlabs OBS and Wondershare Filmora carry out the job. Lastly, with the step-by-step guide to accomplish audio ducking with both the software, we can conclude that OBS performance is better, whereas Wondershare Filmora is the best choice in terms of interface and features!

Benjamin Arango

Benjamin Arango is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Benjamin Arango

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