What I Learned From My 1st Livestream on Twitch

Webcam issues, audio drops & a bumpy debut ride

4 min readMay 25, 2022

If you follow me on Twitter, you will know the struggles I have encountered with Twitch, StreamLabs, OBS, Ableton and virtual drivers…and I hadn’t done a single livestream yet!

The challenges inspired me to write 2 articles to help producers like me get in front of their fans around the world:

So I thought with these roadmaps to hand, I was going to be in for an easy ride. How wrong I was.

First of all, I couldn’t get the virtual webcam to sync up on my Mac using OBS and OBS Ninja. There is a weird thing called an NDI Source that needs to be in place on StreamLabs so you can use the virtual camera.

I was getting the video to show on OBS but not on OBS Ninja. I had entered the URL into the NDI Source on StreamLabs under “Properties” but still nothing.

I played around with the “Browser Source” and “NDI Source” on StreamLabs & finally managed to get the video stream through with brute force. It felt a little like when Han Solo sees the Millennium Falcon is not going to make it into hyperspace and he smacks the dashboard to get it to boot up and narrowly escape the Imperial Starfleet.

Now to the audio. I remembered to add the ReaStream plugin on the master channel of the Ableton project I was working on so the audio could be relayed to StreamLabs. However, once I hit “Go Live” on StreamLabs, I started getting CPU spikes, crackles and latency.

I deleted a few CPU intensive plugins which helped & then made sure the Limiter on the Master channel was set to -0.3dB so it wasn’t going to peak to the people listening and watching on Twitch.

For the first 2 hours, I worked on a new song I am producing called BRIGHTON ROCKS and the experience was good. I had 5 people viewing and commenting.