 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I wanted to do a video today on something slightly complicated, but I think it's important. I just want to talk about if you are using OBS Studio on Ubuntu Linux. I'm not sure which Ubuntu I'm on. There's a point where I just kind of like stop caring. I think I'm on the LTS release cycle. So it's like the latest LTS Ubuntu. In other words, it's pretty recent and I don't think they've made any significant changes to the very basic audio recording GUIs anyway. So what I want to talk about today is how you can use a program called Pulse Effects. Now it doesn't come. It's something you have to add to your distro. This is Pulse Audio Volume Control. I tend to call it PavU Control because that's the command that launches it. But I think it's real name is Pulse Audio Volume Control. So it's a GUI for this. You probably already know this if you're watching this video. What I want to talk about today is how you can use Pulse Effects to apply some equalization to your microphone and more granular changes really when you're recording into OBS. So I'm going to explain that in OBS there are tools available there for doing stuff like noise suppression and dereverb, etc. But if you patch your audio through Pulse Effects, you're going to get more options. So the purpose of this sort of screencast or video, whatever you want to call it, I'm going to just try to explain how the relationship works between these moving parts because that's basically what they are. So the first thing here, you're looking at the levels of the lab microphone I'm speaking into as I record this. And just something about Pulse Audio that I think is worth knowing. There's two pages. When you're looking at recording, you've got your input devices and you've got your recording tab. Now the way this works is as follows, your input devices, you're going to be applying levels here that will reflect across all applications. It's at the kind of interface level, right? So I'm adding the, I'm upping the levels now on the mic and you might be hearing the audio clipping and now I'm dialing it back. Now this is going to inherit across all applications listening in to that microphone or to use more accurate terminology capturing the input stream from that microphone. So I'm recording this screencast into simple screen recorder, which I'll drag over here for a second. So you can see there's only one application taking this audio stream. Now if I make my changes here, they're only going to apply in simple screen recorder. So my recommendation or what I do when I'm trying to get my levels right, and this is an ongoing process of improving my audio, I always clarify, I'm not sort of trying to lecture here and just explaining how I do it. I always start here. And there's one more, one thing that's worth pointing out that I feel like a lot of people will miss because you have to undock the advanced setting. I'm sorry if there's drilling noise available, audible in the background ironically because I'm doing an audio video. There's renovations going on like next door. In any event, latency is something I've covered before in OBS and correcting problematic latencies on your microphones. So one thing worth knowing is that you can actually set a latency here. It can be a positive or a latency or a negative latency in milliseconds, right? So again, from my opinion, if you have a microphone which has latency issues, it's probably something that's going to apply across your applications. So yes, you can set that in OBS, but I kind of think it actually makes more sense to do it here so that, okay, every app, whether you're recording directly into a browser, recording into Twitch or recording into OBS, whatever you're using that microphone for, and you know it's like 20 seconds generally behind. If it's consistent across applications or you've found it, I think it makes much more sense to do your latency here. But of course, it's up to you. And this is especially useful by the way, if you're recording the microphone into an application, that doesn't have a latency editing tool. Okay, so that's tool one in our sort of cadence, if you will. Next one is going to be pulse effects. So I'm going to open it up here. Okay, the way pulse effects is organized. Now I like to keep these all open if I'm using pulse effects, but this, this and OBS and I'm going to open OBS in a second here. The way pulse effects works is kind of as follows. It's pretty interesting. You can equalize your output or your input, so I'm going to click on input by going into microphone. Now, by default, my microphone is recording into simple screen recorder, but I'm not doing anything, I'm not applying anything from pulse effects. How do I do that? Really easy. You'll get a list of the applications that are grabbing your audio stream. And all you need to do is click on the plus icon. Now we see the frequencies, we're getting kind of an equalization thing. And we're getting a, we're getting another level adjustment. So I can, and you should have just lost me for a couple of seconds if everything went to, went to plan. There's no latency here. And you get a little bit more details about what you're recording. Now, I'll open OBS in a second. I think it's beyond the scope of this video. So it's to not control, not, not change so many things, but there are some really, really useful things you can do here. If I click on, if I click on stereo tools. Now I have a microphone in which the left channel, sorry, the right channel it does not record. It's a Beringer UM248 interface. I posted on Reddit and I was like, guys, is there anything that can be done because I have this microphone? It's an XLR and it goes in through Beringer. And I thought it was working great till I listened to my video mine on my TV. And I was like, opened it up on Audacity and like, oh wait, there's no right audio channel. It's only, it has to capture in stereo, but there's nothing coming from the right channel. And I asked him, one of the subreddits, I can't, I think it was the Ubuntu subreddit and I was like, what can I do? Because I can obviously go into Audacity afterwards and mute out the right channel and export the audio. But there must be some way I can like do this on the fly. And people recommended post effects. So thank you Reddit, as I've often said. Reddit can be super helpful and this is what you want to do. Stereo tools and you can mute either the right or the left channel. So I'm muting the right channel now, I'm muting the right channel, I'm muting the left channel, et cetera. So really it's like this post effects thing is like super granular. There's so much you can do. I'm going to take off stereo tools. Now, as I said, I'm going to be a bit childish for a second and you can turn on pitch. I'm going to pitch my imagination and make myself sound probably like a... But this thing works on the fly. So there's no lag as I'm changing stuff here. It's going to be playing. Now, look at the waveforms that we are looking at and look at their height. Now watch what happens when I change stuff. Now we can get some kind of things are dropping, dropping, dropping. So this is why I describe it as kind of a cadence. You've got this passing into this. Now I can actually adjust just to make things slightly more complicated again. I have the input stream. I can see the input from post audio going into post effects. And I can actually decrease the levels going into post effects or I can actually mute from here the microphone. And now you're seeing that none of those waveforms are active. So if you want to click onto applications, you can get back to the main area and that's where you can again just control where it's going. So we've covered so far post audio, post effects and their relationship. Now let's get into OBS Studio. Now obviously you don't need to use post effects at all. You can just record directly into OBS. Now let's see what's going on here. The first thing I need to do is set my audio source to Moono. Now it can be a little bit buggy. Sometimes I'm getting like two OBSs here. So I'm going to turn on OBS 1. Now you can see the recording input here. Linux is naturally going to be a sort of a bogear operating system in some respects. And sometimes you do get issues like this where you're just not seeing a microphone source. So sometimes the easiest way to fix it is just to exit back in. Let's go back into OBS now. And we're still not seeing those levels from this. So I'm going to have to try to diagnose this issue now. But I'm going to not redo this video. I'm actually just going to try to figure it out on the fly because it'll make things more interesting. So we're looking to record into OBS. And if you look for input devices, you should now see in the recording tab the application for OBS. Now you can see the problem. I've identified the problem right now. It's that the channel is muted. And as I've unmuted OBS in volume control, I don't know why it was muted. I'm now getting the level in OBS. So if you're having microphone recognition issues, as I just did unexpectedly, that's why I always like having. Because this is like the master. This is like the intermediate. And this is the application is where the audio feed ends up. So now that I've unmuted the channel, and as I play around with the levels, you can see my OBS levels are changing. Now let's get back to the meat as I called it of this. So there's two OBSs. And again, this is kind of buggy because I'm like, well, which OBS are we talking about here? If I turn on this OBS switch, now if I mute the microphone, we should see the level in OBS falling to zero. And that's exactly what we're seeing right there on the left. So this is the OBS. Don't ask me why there are two OBSs showing here. If I mute this one now, and I'll mute this, we're not seeing the level affected. So this is just kind of, this might be a, I think this is picking up a monitor feed, okay? So this is my OBS. Now, what I'm able to do is, again, if you want to verify, change the levels and pulse effects, and you'll see the levels being affected in the application. And now you can apply everything you can do with pulse effects. Very useful things that you're able to do, like turn on an equalizer and change frequencies. If you're using a microphone with that issue about stereo, I mentioned, you can go ahead and change that here. One last thing in this kind of video that I want to say is as follows, you can do some of this stuff, equalization, editing input sources on the fly in OBS. The way you do that is you look at your microphone source, and you can apply filters. So let's say now this isn't the microphone source, I'm using it after added, but let's just say for argument's sake it was, you click into filters, and you've got these audio filters, compressor, expander, gain, invert, polarity, limiter, noise gate, noise suppression that you can apply. And if I go into gain, you can apply a gain. So this can be done, I'm going to remove it. This can be done in OBS. The advantage really of doing it in pulse effects is you're going to have a lot more options in terms of effects you can apply to the live input stream on the fly. And it's kind of, once you have your microphone sounding good, it's a good idea to monitor it with headphones as you're trying to make these changes, and that's another video basically because that can be complicated in its own right, but once you have the microphone sounding good, I kind of think it's nice to have everything set up here, and in OBS you can just worry, you can just take the microphone input, and then you can just focus on the other aspects of your OBS stream or recording. In order to monitor, I've done a separate YouTube video about that, but there is a playback. You should be getting a monitor for that input, and you can turn that on and then listen to that through stereo headphones. It can be a bit finicky, but when it works, it works nicely, and that's just an easy way of figuring these issues out. So that's basically the triad of PABU Control, Pulse Effects, and OBS, and how they can be used together to apply effects in real time to your microphone or recording source if you're recording in OBS on Ubuntu Linux. Hope that video was useful, and if you'd like to get more videos from me, please subscribe to this YouTube channel.