Here is a situation every streamer who edits highlights runs into sooner or later. You land the best play of the month, and at that precise second a teammate is shouting over you, an alert sound is blaring and the background playlist hits its chorus. On the live stream it was chaos in a fun way. In the editing timeline it is one flattened stereo file, and nothing can be turned down without turning everything down. Separate audio tracks prevent this entirely, and setting them up takes about five minutes.
One Mix for Live, Several Tracks for Later
A live broadcast needs a single finished mix, because viewers receive one audio stream. A recording has no such limit. OBS can write up to six audio tracks into the same video file, each holding whatever sources you assign to it. The live mix goes out as normal while the recording quietly stores the ingredients separately.
The two outputs serve different purposes, so it is reasonable for them to differ. Live audio is about the moment: alerts, music, friends, energy. VOD and highlight audio is about reuse: clean voice, controllable game sound, and nothing that will cause trouble when the clip is uploaded elsewhere.
A Track Layout That Works for Most Channels
A common arrangement looks like this:
- The full mix, exactly as live viewers heard it.
- Your microphone alone, with filters applied.
- Game audio alone.
- Voice chat, such as Discord.
- Music, alerts and other extras.
Track one is your safety net. If you never open the others, the recording still plays normally in any media player, since most players read only the first track. Tracks two to five are there for the day you need them.
Getting voice chat and music onto their own tracks requires that OBS sees them as separate sources in the first place. Application audio capture in OBS handles this for many setups, while others use a virtual audio router or a suite like SteelSeries Sonar to split game, chat and media into distinct devices. The routing is the fiddly part, and the step-by-step explanations at Loadout Audio cover the usual ways of separating Discord and game sound for OBS.
Setting It Up in OBS
In the output settings, switch to the advanced mode so that the recording tab shows numbered audio track checkboxes, and tick every track you intend to use. Then open the advanced audio properties from the mixer, where each source has a row of track boxes. Assign each source to track one plus its own dedicated track, following the layout above.
Two details save grief. First, record to MKV rather than MP4. An MKV file survives a crash or power cut with everything up to that moment intact, and OBS can remux it to MP4 afterwards from its file menu without re-encoding. Second, name your tracks in the output settings if your version allows it, because “Track 4” means nothing to you three months from now.
Before trusting it, record one minute with game, music and a friend talking, then drop the file into your editor. You should see several audio lanes under the video. If you see only one, the usual causes are unticked track boxes on the recording tab or an editor that needs multi-track import enabled.
The Twitch VOD Track
Twitch supports a related feature for the broadcast itself. OBS has a Twitch VOD Track option in its advanced streaming output settings, which sends a second audio track alongside the live one. Live viewers hear the main mix, while the saved broadcast and clips made from it use the alternate track.
The obvious use is music. Assign your playlist to the live track only, leave it off the VOD track, and the archived version contains your voice and game with no music underneath. This reduces the chance of muted sections in your past broadcasts. It is not legal cover, though: music played live is still subject to the platform’s rules and the rights holders’ claims, so treat the feature as housekeeping rather than permission.
What You Can Fix in the Edit
With isolated tracks, problems that used to ruin clips become ordinary edits. Duck the game under your voice for a punchline that got buried. Mute a teammate who said something that should not go on YouTube. Remove the alert that fired over the key moment. Apply noise reduction or loudness normalization to your voice alone without pumping the game sound. Swap the music for a licensed track, or drop it altogether for short-form uploads.
Five Minutes Now, Hours Back Later
Multi-track recording costs a slightly larger file and a one-time setup, and then it runs unattended forever. Most nights you will never touch the extra tracks. On the night the perfect clip arrives wrapped in noise, you will open the editor, pull one fader down, and be finished in the time it used to take to decide the clip was unusable.