How To Record Desktop Audio In OBS On Apple M1 Mac Computers
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How To Record Desktop Audio In OBS On Apple M1 Mac Computers Before IOS 13, M1 and M2 Mac users were unable to record desktop audio so in this video, Will teaches you how to install the third party plugins you need and how to set them up to get everything to work.
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
In this video, we're going to talk about how to record desktop audio, like the audio coming from a YouTube video, on the M1 Mac. Traditionally, on older Macs, you were able to do this with a plug-in called Soundflower. You might be familiar with it, but when they made the Apple silicon chips, the M1 and M2 chips, the developer who made Soundflower didn't update it. I don't know if they will, so you have to use a third-party software in order to get your system to be able to do it.
And, as a bonus, I'll show you how I got the desktop volume controls to work on my keyboard. Because when you go through the process of getting the desktop audio to work, you lose the keyboard controls. And I don't know about you, but I'm a bit obsessive with making sure that things work the way that I want them to work, and the keyboard control not working was bugging me to no end. So I did find a solution. So in this video, I'll show you how to record desktop audio on the M1 Mac. Alright, let's jump in.
First off, I do want to point out that if you are on Mac OS version 13, known as Ventura or higher, then you will not need to go through the steps in this video in terms of installing a third-party plug-in to get desktop audio recording to work. It should just work natively, as it says here on the obsproject.com website. So double check which version of the operating system you have by going up to the Apple, about this Mac, and you'll see right here. So I'm on version 12.5, which is obviously not 13 or higher. So I will need to install a third-party plug-in in order to get desktop audio to work.
So the way we do that is go to a search engine like Google, type in "blackhole audio Mac," and then the top link, which is this existential dot audio website, you can click that, enter some information, and then you'll be able to get access to the download. Once that's downloaded, open it up and go through all the steps to install it onto your system. It's pretty straightforward, and then we're not done yet. Now we have to go and create a multi-output device. So do a spotlight search on your Mac, which is a little magnifying glass up here, type in "MIDI," and then this audio devices panel will pop up. You'll be able to confirm that Blackhole has been installed on your system, and then you should also see a few other options depending on the computer that you're working on.
So I'm working on an M1 Ultra Max studio, and I'm also using a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 as my sound card. That's where my monitors are plugged in, that's where my mic is plugged in, that's where my headphone is plugged in. So it's basically the sound card for my Mac, and it connects to the computer with a USB cable. So we're not actually going to be using black hole in this configuration. Instead, we're going to go down to the plus and we're going to create a multi-output device. I already have one created here, so once you get yours created, you can click on the name and rename it to whatever you want. I would suggest though that you name it something like "main audio device," "main output," or "main sound device," something like that. In my case, I was using the Scarlett 1898 as my main output device, and now I'll be using this one.
So I change the name to "Scarlett18i8" and then put "Main" in front of it, so this will be the main output sound device that I use. And then on the right here, you need to enable black hole so that it is selected on the new multi-output device that you made, as well as the other device, whatever that may be. Let's say you're on a laptop and you aren't using some external device like a Scarlett 1898, for example, then you would just select the black hole and the Mac Studio speakers.
Okay, so we have that set up now. We can close this and then you can open up whatever recording device you're going to be using for screen captures. In this case, we are using OBS. So to get this all set up, you create your scene, and then you can go down to plus and you can select audio output capture. You can give it a name, hit OK, and then for the device, this is where you want to make sure that the black hole 2 channel is selected. You now will be able to record desktop audio on your M1 Mac. And with this setup, we'll now do a test.
So you can go to like YouTube, or something. In this case, we'll be using epidemic sound, which is where we get all our sound effects and music for our YouTube videos. So I'll play one of these, and then we'll go back to OBS, and you'll see that desktop audio is working.
Okay, so that's pretty straightforward on how to record desktop audio in the M1 Mac before version 13. Now I did talk about keyboard volume controls and how, if you go this route, you will lose the ability to change the volume using the keyboard controls. There is a solution I found, but it does cost a bit of money. It's like 40 or 50 bucks, and that is by downloading the "Sound Source" audio plugin.
Then you go up to settings, preferences, go to audio, and then you can turn on keyboard volume controls, super volume keys. From there, on the main output, you can choose that multi-output device that we created, and you are good to go.
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