How to Set Up a Microphone in OBS: Step by Step

Most microphone guides for OBS jump straight to filters. Filters are the last ten percent. Before any of that matters, four plain things have to be right: OBS has to be listening to the correct device, the operating system has to allow it, the level has to land in a usable range, and the audio has to be routed to the track your file is actually recording.

Get those wrong and no amount of noise suppression rescues the take. Get them right and a $60 USB microphone sounds fine.

Global Device or Audio Input Capture Source?

OBS gives you two ways to add a microphone, and picking the wrong one causes the classic "why am I hearing myself twice" problem.

Settings → Audio → Global Audio Devices → Mic/Auxiliary Audio adds the microphone to every scene at once. This is what you want for screen recording, where the narration is constant and the scenes are just different views of your work.

Sources → + → Audio Input Capture adds the microphone as a source inside one scene. Use this when a microphone should only be live in certain scenes, or when you need two microphones with separate filters and levels.

Use one or the other for a given microphone. If you set the same device as a global device and add it as a source, OBS captures it twice, and you get a doubled, slightly phased voice that sounds like a bad phone call. If you already have that, delete the Audio Input Capture source or set the global device to Disabled, and keep whichever one you meant.

Let the Operating System In

macOS: the first time OBS asks for the microphone, macOS shows a permission prompt. If you dismissed it, no meter will ever move. Fix it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone, enable OBS, then quit and reopen OBS. The permission is only read at launch.

Windows: Settings → Privacy & security → Microphone, and make sure Let desktop apps access your microphone is on. Then check the device is not disabled at the system level in Sound settings → Input.

If the meter is dead, this is the first place to look, before you start swapping cables. OBS microphone not working covers the rest of that diagnosis path.

Set the Level Where It Belongs

Speak at the volume you will actually present at, not a test voice, and watch the meter for your microphone in the Audio Mixer dock.

• Peaks should sit around -12 dB to -6 dB, which is in the yellow band.
• Constant green with nothing reaching yellow means you are too quiet, and turning it up later amplifies the room noise with your voice.
• Anything touching red is clipping. Clipping is not loudness, it is distortion, and it cannot be fixed afterwards. This is the one audio mistake that ruins a take outright.

Now the part that trips people up: the fader in the OBS mixer is not gain. It is an output level applied after capture. If your voice is arriving quiet, raising that fader raises the hiss with it. Set the actual input gain first, at the source:

• USB microphone with a physical knob: turn the knob.
• Audio interface: set the preamp gain on the interface.
• No hardware control: Windows Sound Control Panel → Recording → your mic → Properties → Levels, or macOS System Settings → Sound → Input.

Only once the hardware level is right should you touch the OBS fader, and then only for small adjustments.

While you are in the audio settings, set Settings → Audio → Sample Rate to 48 kHz and leave it there. Video is a 48 kHz world. Mixing a 44.1 kHz device into a 48 kHz project is a known source of slow drift, where the audio starts in sync and is noticeably late twenty minutes in. If that already happened to you, OBS audio out of sync has the full diagnosis.

Monitoring, and Why You Might Be Hearing an Echo

Monitoring is how you hear yourself while recording, and it has its own setting per source. Right click anywhere in the Audio Mixer → Advanced Audio Properties, then look at the Audio Monitoring column.

Two rules keep this out of trouble. Wear headphones if you monitor at all, because monitoring through speakers feeds your own voice back into the microphone. And if your recording has a doubled or echoing voice, check this column first: Monitor and Output on a microphone that is also being captured normally is the usual culprit. Fixing audio echo in OBS covers the other causes.

Put the Microphone on Its Own Track

This is the setting that separates a recording you can fix later from one you cannot, and it costs nothing.

In Advanced Audio Properties, each source has checkboxes for tracks 1 to 6. In Settings → Output → Recording (Advanced mode), you choose which tracks get written to the file.

• Track 1: everything mixed together, the track any player will use.
• Track 2: microphone only.
• Track 3: desktop audio only.

Tick those in the source rows, enable tracks 1, 2 and 3 in the recording settings, and your file carries separate stems. If your voice ends up buried under application audio, you can rebalance in an editor instead of re-recording. If you never need it, the mixed track is still there and nothing has changed.

The other side of this is the classic silent recording: a source that is only assigned to a track you are not writing produces a perfect video with no sound. If a mixer meter is bouncing but the file is silent, check the track boxes before anything else.

Mute and Push to Talk Hotkeys

Settings → Hotkeys has Mute and Unmute entries for each audio source, plus Push to talk and Push to mute.

For screen recording, a mute hotkey is the tool you want far more often than a pause. Coughing, a colleague walking in, or a phone ringing all cost you a couple of seconds of silence to trim rather than a risky pause you might forget to release. Bind a three key combination, and test it inside the application you are recording, since global hotkeys can be swallowed by an elevated window.

Push to talk is a streaming habit. It is usually a bad fit for narration, because it clips the first syllable of every sentence.

Now, and Only Now, Add Filters

With the device correct, the level right, and the routing sane, filters are the finishing pass. The two that matter are Noise Suppression and a Compressor, in that order, and the order genuinely changes the result.

That is a subject of its own, and it has its own page: how to reduce background noise in OBS covers the three suppression methods, the noise gate thresholds, and the filter chain order in full. Set the basics on this page first, because a filter applied to a clipped or wrongly routed signal just processes the problem.

If your voice is crackling or breaking up rather than merely noisy, that is a different fault entirely, usually USB or sample rate related. OBS mic crackling and distorted audio is the place to start.

The Setup Cost, Honestly

Everything above is a one time job. It also assumes you want a mixer, filters and per source routing, which is the correct set of tools for a live broadcast with multiple people and multiple audio feeds.

For one person narrating a product walkthrough, it is a lot of machinery in front of a simple goal. Cubix Capture takes the other approach: it picks up your microphone and your system audio together with no device routing or track assignment, keeps them in sync, and frames the video around wherever your cursor is working, so the recording is finished when you stop. It runs on Windows and macOS and the free Starter plan is enough to compare against the setup above.

If you are running a stream with guests, music, alerts and per source filters, OBS is the right tool and this page is the order to configure it in.

Keep Reading

• How to Reduce Background Noise in OBS for the filter chain, in detail.
• OBS Microphone Not Working for a mic OBS refuses to see at all.
• OBS Mic Crackling and Distorted Audio for a signal that arrives broken rather than noisy.
• How to Set Up Desktop Audio in OBS for the other half of the mixer.
• How to Record Screen with Both Mic and System Audio for getting the two into one file cleanly.