This morning, a producer I know who’s big into streaming on his monetized YouTube channel was telling me about the difficulties he has to go through to stream his music production sessions live. I was explaining to him that the issue he described sounds like its because UA Apollo all-in-one interfaced suck lol. The single-client driver was forcing him to get creative and utilize subpar 3rd party drivers to get audio from his DAW to OBS. I recommended he switch to RME because the preamps are better, the converters are a small but audible improvement over UA Apollos, and because RME’s TotalMixFX driver is an ASIO/ASIO multiclient driver that will connect to both programs simultaneously.
At the studio where I work, I regularly track session players remotely over VST Connect Pro because its easier to call or even quickly find a session player on social media and have them connect to our master session in Nuendo than to be limited to local musicians only and have to get them to drive to the studio (also much cheaper, which clients are thankful for), but when I get lonely sitting alone mixing/mastering artist’s Dolby Atmos projects, I’ll sometimes live stream to social media while I work. It easy for me because Nuendo utilizes our 512x512 channel Dante card to output from the PC to the Dolby RMU, which leaves plenty of channels for analog processing and output to DVS. We have multiple NICs. So, I just run OBS on the Dante Virtual Soundcard ASIO driver in WDM mode and patch the DAW audio to DVS in Dante Controller.
Unfortunately, bedroom studio producers like my friend don’t have the advantages of a half-million dollar rig like the one I use for work. I suspect that his issue isn’t unique. If he’s dealing with it, odds are that millions of others have the same issue.
This is a problem that Steinberg is best positioned to resolve, if they haven’t already. The best solution would be an ASIO driver that bridges the DAW and OBS, WaveLab or whatever a streamer is using. The best solution would be for OBS, whatever the low tier version of WaveLab for podcasters is called, and the rest of the options out there to adopt ReWire, but Reason Studios discontinued ReWire support because the foolishly expected Reason Rack to make ReWire obsolete and Steinberg didn’t seize the opportunity to release their own “CubeWire” or whatever they might’ve otherwise called it.
I don’t know how nor even if MixKey bridges DAW audio to OBS, but if they offer such a solution, there’s definitely a market that would gladly jump to it.
So, how does it work?