Setting Up Streamlabs

posted April 5/5, 2021, by Andrew Biedron

Virtually my entire life I’ve had a love for and have been gaming. I started by playing badly made Flash games on an old Mac in my kitchen closet and then progressed to Wii games and mobile games on an iPod Touch. My interest in streaming began in 6th grade when I got an iPad for school and found Vainglory. Vainglory was a huge MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) and I got a bunch of my friends into it, creating my first real gaming community. Vainglory also had a big competitive scene that I would watch on the popular streaming platform, Twitch. Seeing that gamers like me could stream out their passion for the world to enjoy was truly amazing to me, and it sparked my interest in doing it myself. That interest grew throughout middle school as I continued to watch various streams on Twitch.

In the summer before 9th grade, I built my first gaming PC and could finally stream myself. So I made a new Twitch account and began to look for streaming programs. I researched a couple and tried one called OBS for a while, but I found it badly designed and confusing. Then I found Streamlabs, and I’ve never looked back. Today I’m going to walk you through how to set Streamlabs up and use it.

First things first, you’re going to need to download it, which isn’t hard to do. All you need to do is go to streamlabs.com and click download. It will automatically download the correct version for your type of computer, so all you have to do is wait and open the installer when it’s done. Once you open it, it should start installing the application. After it’s installed, it will automatically open and prompt you to log in to your streaming platform account, such as Twitch, Youtube, Facebook, or another streaming platform. You can stream to multiple platforms at the same time, but for now, just sign in to one (it doesn’t matter which).

Once you’re signed in, there are a couple of important things you’ll need to do in order to start streaming. The first thing is getting your stream key. In your account settings on the streaming platform, there will be something called a stream key. Copy this and open the “Stream” tab in your Streamlabs settings. Paste the stream key in the box labeled for it. This key is how Streamlabs knows where to send your stream, and it’s unique to you, so if anyone you don’t trust gets this code, replace it ASAP.

Technically, you can now go live on whatever platform you are signed into. Before you do, you’ll probably want to add some scenes and sources. In Streamlabs, in the box named scenes, you can now start creating scenes to use during streaming. To create one, you just press the plus button, and then name it whatever you want. When you’re done, it’ll appear in the box below. Within these scenes, you can add sources in the sources box. These sources dictate what is going to show up on the stream when you have a specific scene selected. To add a source, click on the scene you want to put it in, and then click on the plus button above the sources box. This will bring up another window full of different types of sources.

The two sources that are almost necessary are a display capture, window capture, or other video source, and an audio source of some kind. An audio input capture will be a microphone, and an audio output capture will be something coming out of your computer, most likely just your desktop audio. You don’t need to include those, but it won’t be much of a stream without them. If you want to add more sources, Streamlabs has a lot more options for you to choose from, and you can easily explore them on your own.

One more thing that I find useful to know about in Streamlabs is their hotkey system. In settings under the “hotkeys” tab, you can scroll through all of the sources in all of your created scenes, and assign hotkeys to turn them on and off. I have a few hotkeys set for switching between scenes and muting my audio sources so that I don’t have to leave my game to go manage my stream, I can just press a button and it will do it for me. Whether you have the ability to spare a few keys is a different issue, but if you can, I find having a few hotkeys to be extremely helpful.

There’s a lot more to learn about Streamlabs, but that’s how to set up the basics and get your stream ready to go live. Almost everything in Streamlabs is pretty intuitive, too, so you don’t have to worry about being super confused about something you thought would be simple, and the things that aren’t are so obscure I highly doubt you’ll ever need to even find it, let alone use it. So with Streamlabs set up and ready to go, just click that “Go Live” button, set your title, and happy streaming!