Hi, I'm Stryxnine. I'm an esports broadcast producer and audio producer. In this chost I'll be explaining the key ways to immediately improve the audio on your livestreams.
Why should I care?
Glad you asked! The biggest reason is because advertisements are fucking loud. Unfortunately, with advertisers constantly in a loudness war with each other, we have to care about our audio levels so when ads pop up for our viewers they don't scare the everloving piss out of them with the immediate difference in volume. Beyond that, we wanna make sure we can be heard over the game and the music playing in the background.
Ok, so how do I do it?
It's pretty easy, but it's also a bit of a process!
Set Your Audio Bars To Be Vertical
You'll be able to fit a lot more levels at a time than you would if they were horizontal! That's the main thing; after that, it's all up to taste and preference. you can change it by right-clicking on the audio mixer dock itself or clicking on the three-dot button if you have that
also mute Desktop Audio BUT keep it visible, it makes for a real easy benchmark you can eyeball once in a while
Piggy backing on the good advice so far: using True Peak for your meters incurs a CPU hit but especially if you're setting your levels via OBS, setting your VUs to True Peak is real useful. I've found True Peak to be extremely close to what I see at my mixer, while Sample Peak is often (but not always) pretty close.