With OBS Studio you can stream or record on your PC, without purchasing any software. One of the best streaming software, and also you can record audio as well. However If you currently doesn’t have a medium or a high-end microphone, you will face with noises. But don’t worry there are included solutions in OBS, called noise gate and noise suppression, which help you to cancel out the disturbing sounds.
In this article we go through every step you need to do to set up properly these audio effects, without having a $1000 mic you can reach a good quality, for streaming. Some of the settings are understandable, but we describe all of them, as well as with practical values. Also you can use third party softwares too, which may have more options.
OBS Noise Gate
OBS noise gate automatically turn down or we can say cancel the microphone sound when there’s no sound or speaking. So between two sentence or a longer monologue, there won’t be any white noise and annoying buzz.
You can add any filters to the desktop or the microphone source, with the gear icon at the right. There you’ll find the Propertios options as well for changing the source.
After clicking on the Filters, you get a new window, where these filters are located. Go to the left bottom corner and click on the plus sign and choose “Noise Gate”
Now you’re added the Noise Gate audio filter to your microphone, and basically you’re ready to go, but before that, let’s check out the options.
The Close Threshold is when the noise gate will be active, while the Open Threshold, when it’s turning off. Firstly you should check out your microphone volume with a little test. The following image shows you how it’s working
The close threshold should be 10 dB under your voice, while 3-4 dB under for open threshold.
The Attack Time is when your volume is reached the Open Threshold, the noise gate will be turned off after the desired seconds. The Hold Time is a time after the Close Threshold. So If your volume not reached the open threshold, after 200ms, noise gate will be activated.
OBS Noise Suppression
With the Noise Suppression you can filter out unwanted background noises like you computer fan, white noise, and other people. There’s two method included in OBS Studio, and also you can use Nvidia as well.
Stay on the current tab, and click on again, the plus sign, but choose Noise Suppression.
After you added the filter, you have two noise suppression method. RNNoise and Speex.
RNNoise is one of the best method, which is based on neural network and machine learning. If you pick this one then you don’t need to change any other settings, the plugin will do the job. However as we mentioned this is a machine learning based solution, therefore you can experience more CPU usage then the Speex method.
Speex is based on constant values, therefore It will be using less power, and you can change the suppression volume as well. However It may be not effective as the other one.
What solution you can’t see here, but If you have an Nvidia RTX GPU, you can use the built-in noise suppression, which uses your GPU power, rather than CPU. Also It’s using Nvidia solutions, than OBS.
To be able to use it, you need to download the Nvidia Broadcast SDK. You can find video and AR solutions as well, but you need to install the Audio Effects.
Which was the best solution for you?
Did you set it up perfectly? Let us know in the comments.
