—Categories: VATSIM

Using VoiceMeeter MacroButtons to mute and unmute audio sources in OBS

This post assumes you have already followed the initial setup steps covered in the routing audio with VoiceMeeter Potato, Discord, and VectorAudio post and then set up MacroButtons for auto-ducking.

Auto-ducking is great, but what if you also want to stream the audio via OBS and mute accordingly? In my case I stream both my position’s radio communications (typically tower) as well as other controllers on above or below me (typically ground or departure). I want to mute the other positions whenever there’s radio traffic on my frequency.

Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Add the audio sources to OBS

In the sources pane click the + button and select Audio Input Capture. Name the input VATSIM – Primary and set the device to Voicemeeter out B1 (VB-Audio Voicemeeter VAIO).

Create a second Audio Input Capture source, name it VATSIM – Secondary and set the device to Voicemeeter out B2 (VB-Audio Voicemeeter VAIO).

Step 2: Route the VATSIM audio in VoiceMeeter

In VoiceMeeter click the B1 button for the VATSIM – Primary input and the B2 button for the VATSIM – Secondary input. This will route input 3 to B1 and input 4 to B2 in addition to sending those inputs to your headset.

VoiceMeeter should look like this:

At this point you can test and make sure that audio from VectorAudio flows out to your stream.

Step 3: Add mute and unmute hotkeys in OBS for the VATSIM – Secondary source

Click Settings and go to the Hotkeys tab. Use the filter box to filter for mute, then scroll until you find the fields for VATSIM – Secondary. Assign a hotkey for Mute and Unmute. (As tempting as it is to use Push-to-mute I never could get that to work).

When you’re done it should look like this:

If you are using extended function keys (F13 and higher) it is a giant pain to actually get OBS to know about them since you have to actually press the key. I worked around this by mapping a button on my StreamDeck to send the function key using the Super Macro Keystroke PTT command.

Step 4: Update the MacroButtons to send the mute and unmute keys

Right click on the Auto-duck – receive button in the VoiceMeeter macro button app. Add the script commands to send your mute key on trigger in and unmute key on trigger out:

Then right click on the Auto-duck – transmit button and add the same script commands:

Other variations

While this specifically shows auto-muting the VATSIM – Secondary source in OBSyou could do any number of other things in OBS, provided there’s a mappable hotkey for it. Basically just send the hotkey from VoiceMeeter MacroButtons and then trigger whatever action you want in OBS. Nice!

—Categories: Uncategorized

Recording a timelapse with OBS and Adobe Media Encoder

I wanted to record a timelapse of a long streaming session (four hours long) but didn’t want to record four hours of video to my drive just to throw out a ton of the frames. After a bit of digging I found a post in the OBS forums that gave me a head start on figuring this out. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Configure OBS video settings

In Settings > Video configure the output resolution as you want, then set the framerate to Integer FPS Value and the number of frames you want to capture per second. In my case I did 1. If you want even slower than that you can use the Fractional FPS Value setting.

In Settings > Output > Recording set up your output file options as you want. In my case I simply switched to MPEG-4 (.mp4) as the recording format. I left everything else the same.

Step 2: Stream and record

This is the easy part. Do your stream and record the video. Don’t forget to hit Start Recording in OBS or you’ll be really sad after!

When you’re done and hit Stop Recording be patient. It can take a minute or so for the recording to stop.

Step 3: Re-encode in Adobe Media Encoder

Since we recorded at 1fps the video file seems to be as long as the entire stream. Instead we want it to be 60 fps with all the existing frames used, no interpolation.

Adobe Media Encoder can do this. Load the recorded file in to Adobe Media Encoder, right click on it, and select Interpret Footage…. Make sure you right click on the video, not on the encoder settings beneath it.

In the resulting dialog select Assume this frame rate and then enter your desired frame rate (in my case 60fps).

Hit OK then apply whatever output encoding format you want and export. Voila! Your video just became seconds instead of minutes.