Recording your screen and audio out, etc

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

I bet you guys have some experience with this and figured you could help me.

I want to record my screen (my DAW specifically), the audio going out of my computer (so that people hear the music start/stop) and my voice all at the same time. I have virtually no experience with this so any help would be appreciated. I’m sure there’s some decent software for Windows to record the screen? For audio out of my computer, I was going to take a headphone out into…Well that’s the problem. My phone? I don’t have an external recorder like a zoom or anything like that. Maybe I should invest in that? Or is there a quick and dirty way (I’ve got a Scarlett 18i20) to route my headphone out audio into audacity or something?

Then, for recording my voice, I was thinking of setting up the voice recorder on my phone and using my lav. Later I would sync all that stuff together.

Thanks guys.

#2

For my videos I use OBS for the screen capture, and I record my headphone output into my Zoom H4n, which is also my mic for my videos. OBS can capture the windows stereo mix, by is probably not the quality audio you want.

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#3

Hmm what’s so bad about obs capturing the windows stereo mix?

#4

Virtual cable. Basically an audio IO device that you can route internally. You could route main audio to cable input and record in audacity from cable output. There’s also jack.

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#5

I never got very good audio this way ( a LOT of aliasing and artifacts, although ymmv) and if your project uses a lot of vsts or heavy plugins, your audio buffer will need to be wayyy higher than if you were using asio, for example. As you can imagine this can add more latency than necessary as well.

#6

Thanks for the replies. Does anybody know how to record other videos? Like you see people on youtube commenting on other youtube videos. Is there a way to just download youtube videos?

#7

I use Screenflow. Super easy to use and plenty of options but unfortunately it’s Mac only. I just googled Screenflow PC alternatives and got this https://acethinker.com/desktop-recorder/screenflow-for-windows.html

Might be worth trying the demos :man_shrugging:t2:

#8

If you have multiple outs on your interface you can send your audio to a separate USB mixer and select that in a program like OBS. That is what I do and it is 1:1 audio quality. Which is what you want.

#9

OBS is convenient because you can select Audio sources / Video sources, mix and match… it has volume mixer. you can make video screens smaller and create custom layouts.

#10

This is what I ended up doing and it worked best. I tried messing with virtual audio cables and had no idea what the hell was going on. Youtube and other tutorials weren’t any help either. I have a Yamaha MG10XU lying around and figured I’d give it a shot.

For some reason though even though I go into OBS audio settings and set the device to MG10X (I also installed the drivers just in case) OBS only wants to recognize it as “mic/aux” :man_shrugging: Either way, it’s still recording my output (headphone out of Scarlett 18i20 into inputs 7/8 of mixer).

Now I’m going to either set up a lav mic and record it into my voice recorder on my phone, or just record it into the mixer and make 100% sure my voice and music levels are good…I think I’d rather have the flexibility to adjust it later, though.

For folks that don’t have a USB mixer lying around idk what the solution is. Virtual Cables aren’t as easy as telling your DAW to send audio to a cable, then telling OBS to pull audio from that cable. I spent a couple hours reading and watching and configuring settings and it was a mess. This ghetto-rig will have to do haha.

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#11

You’re probably not using your spdif input or output on your interface. Route the spdif out to spdif in and setup the routing for Spdif out to be your computer’s audio. I’m pretty sure the yellow RCA cable used for video will work fine to route the digital audio stream from the spdif out/in.

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#12

Huh interesting I’ll try that next time. Not a single other person in all the forum posts or videos I saw mentioned spdif.

Wouldn’t this cause audio feedback though?

#13

How would I do this in the focusrite suite?

#14

Yeah i don’t know why it isn’t more widespread. I used to do it. It works but i don’t use a focusrite interface anymore so i’m not sure of the particulars. You do have to make sure you’re not setting up feedback loops. I think that mostly means you don’t ever want to monitor the spdif input directly (meaning send it to your computer’s audio output stream), just know that what’s going there will be what you’re hearing on another channel that you actually are monitoring.

#15

Glad I helped :slight_smile:

#16

Reviving this for an OS question:
Is there any alternative to OBS for a PC running Windows 7? I just realised OBS is only compatible with Windows 8 and onwards. I’ve been thinking of Screencast-o-matic, but that requires a subscription in order to capture internal audio.