How to Listen to Music Without Sending it to OBS on Linux

Published

This tutorial will show you how you can choose which applications send their audio to OBS.

For the longest time, I couldn't figure out how I could listen to my music without playing it on stream. Most of the help I've found involved using the Voicemeeter software, which is only available on Windows.

There are likely other ways to achieve the same result, however, I will be demonstrating one way with Easy Effects, which is compatible with Pipewire.

1. Install Software

I installed the software with Flatpak, using the Flathub repository. This guide will not go over how to set up Flatpak.

You can install these with the respective GUI software store, such as GNOME Software or Discover (KDE), depending on your choice of desktop environment.

Installation via Terminal
flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio com.github.wwmm.easyeffects

2. Configure Easy Effects

  1. Open up the Easy Effects application.

  2. Open up the preferences from the hamburger menu (☰). Disable the "Process All Output Streams" option. The "Process All Input Streams" should be disabled by default, but disable it if it isn't. Having these options turned off will prevent Easy Effects from automatically including new sources. You can now close this preferences window.

  3. Back on the main window, enable the applications you wish to pipe through to OBS. In the screenshot below, the audio from the mpv application will be sent to the audio sink, which OBS will pick up during recording/streaming.

  4. You can close the Easy Effects application if the "Shutdown on Window Closing" preference is toggled off.

3. Configure OBS Studio

  1. Open up OBS and open up the settings.

  2. Click on the Audio tab and under Global Audio Devices, change Desktop Audio 2 to "Easy Effects Sink". I am keeping the Desktop Audio value to the default just in case I want to have OBS pick up all of my desktop audio, though you can choose to change Desktop Audio to the sink instead of changing Desktop Audio 2. Click Apply and then OK to close the window.

  3. Under the Audio Mixer panel, mute the Desktop Audio source and make sure that Desktop Audio 2 is available and active.

4. [Optional] Set the Audio Sources to Separate Tracks

If you are recording footage, it can be handy to have the desktop audio on a separate track from your microphone, especially if you plan on making edits in post-production.

  1. Under the Audio Mixer panel, click the gear icon to open the Advanced Audio Properties window.

  2. All of the available tracks will be enabled for all of the sources. Disable the unneeded tracks and make sure that the Desktop Audio sources are using a separate track to the Mic/Aux source. Here, I have dedicated the desktop audio to to track 1 and my microphone to track 2.

Conclusion

That's it! You can now add whatever scenes and sources you wish and you will be able to listen to things in the background without having them sent to OBS.

If you'd like to add something I've missed, or you've noticed an error, feel free to open up a pull request on Codeberg!

Happy streaming!