You’ve been live streaming for a while now, and your video is finally where you want it to be. Your cameras and lighting are dialed in, and your team of volunteers has mastered the visual flow of delivering an advanced production in a repeatable manner. But as great as your video looks, there’s more to live streaming than just what’s on screen.
Audio often gets overlooked in live streaming. When it comes to your soundboard, your team probably spends most of their energy fine-tuning the front-of-house mix to create a great experience for those attending in person. But that mix doesn’t typically translate well to your live stream. Often not everything is miked for live sound and isn’t in the broadcast mix, drums are so loud in person that they’re very soft in the mix, and those watching your events online have an entirely different listening environment.
In this blog, we’ll provide a practical path for you to begin mixing your live stream audio in real time, without much cost or effort. There’s no better way for you to take your live stream viewer’s experience to the next level.
Table of Contents
Live Stream Audio Mixing: The Primary Problem
If you're fortunate enough to have someone dedicated to your live stream audio mix, their first job is simple but crucial: to be a listener. “How does the person speaking sound? Are the musicians blending well? Are crowd noises too quiet or too overwhelming for the online audience?” Whatever the event, their role is to watch and listen for anything that sounds off and needs attention.
Once they’ve identified an issue, their second responsibility is to make the necessary adjustments, whether that’s tweaking a single channel or balancing a few at the same time. If you're really lucky, you have a seasoned pro who can make those changes in seconds, instantly improving the mix.
But even with all this going for you, there's a catch: if your team is making adjustments based on what they see and hear in the live stream feed, those changes aren't happening in real time. That’s because the video they’re watching already has built-in latency.
Imagine making an adjustment and then waiting about 30 seconds to see if it was too much or not quite enough. That kind of delay makes it incredibly tough for the person mixing to confirm if their modifications landed just right. If they undercorrect, the original problem lingers; if they overcorrect, they've simply created a new one. This frustrating cycle of waiting and guessing has no place in a good mix, yet it's surprisingly common.
All of this boils down to the core problem with live stream audio mixing: Adjustments made after watching a delayed feed come much too late—making it nearly impossible to achieve an ideal audio experience for your online viewers.
Live Stream Latency: Diving Deeper
Latency in live streaming often gets a bad rap, but the truth is, latency isn’t actually a bad thing—in fact, it’s an intentional part of a streaming provider’s platform and protocol.
Latency creates a buffer that gives your broadcast time to deliver the massive amount of video and audio data to the cloud and then down to viewers. When data packets are lost—something that happens more often than you’d think—latency allows the streaming protocol to retransmit them. That’s how viewers avoid issues like buffering, audio glitches, or blurred video. Other important aspects of streaming factor into latency, as well, like transcoding and distribution.
At BoxCast, we use a standard 2-second latency for all live streams. But with our BoxCast Flow Control feature, you can increase that latency to 15 seconds—or even up to 90 seconds—if you’re on a less reliable network and expect significant packet loss. This latency control helps maintain a seamless experience, even under challenging network conditions.
So yes, latency is your friend when it comes to stream stability. But it introduces a major complication for audio mixing: You’re making changes in the moment—yet they’re being heard several seconds later. By the time you react to what you’re hearing, it might already be too late to fix it for your viewers.
Solving Live Mixing’s Problem
Imagine having the best of both worlds: your live stream still includes a small, intentional latency buffer to handle network hiccups—but your audio mixing isn’t stuck behind that delay. You’re mixing the moment it happens.
To make this possible, you’ll need two key things in place.
Real-Time Audio + Video Monitoring
The person responsible for your live stream audio needs to watch and listen to the event as it’s actually happening—not several seconds later via the delayed live stream feed. Real-time observation is critical for catching and correcting mixing issues the moment they occur. This allows you to use the stream’s latency to your advantage, because you will often be able to identify and remedy issues well before the buffer ends and the viewer’s listening experience begins. In instances where it takes a bit longer to fix a problem, latency makes it so that viewers hear the issue for a much shorter time, essentially shrinking the problem and increasing the chances that they continue watching.
Instantaneous Mixing Control
Once they notice something’s off, your team member needs immediate access to the audio mixer and the ability to make changes on the fly. If your board is primarily being used to monitor your house mix, then you’re at a disadvantage, because you may have to wait to switch to and access your live stream mix. Delayed control means delayed fixes—something your online audience will definitely notice and something that they’ll probably let you know about via text, chat, and on social channels.
Now, getting each of these pieces in place might sound complicated. After all, there hasn’t really been a tool designed specifically to solve this problem—until now.
Introducing RemoteMix
BoxCast has been helping organizations broadcast live content online for well over a decade.
Over the years, we’ve expanded our offerings with tools like our website builder and custom OTT streaming apps. But our newest product is focused on solving one of live streaming’s biggest pain points: audio mixing.
RemoteMix allows your team to control your digital mixer from anywhere in the world—as long as you have an internet-connected device. You’ll have full, channel-by-channel control of your live stream mix. But what really sets RemoteMix apart is that it pairs this control with real-time monitoring of your stream’s audio and video.
This means that RemoteMix allows live broadcasters to:
- Monitor your stream in real time
- Make instantaneous changes that only apply to your live stream mix
If this sounds familiar, it’s because these are the same requirements we covered in the previous section for achieving real-time live stream audio mixing. Oh, and RemoteMix makes it possible to do all of that from anywhere, which is a pretty great bonus, but we’ll save the many benefits of remote access to your mixer for another blog.
Final Thoughts + Next Steps
Great video is a crucial part of any live stream, but without great audio even the most polished visuals can fall flat. In fact, poor audio is one of the fastest ways to frustrate or lose viewers, no matter how great your video looks.
If you’re not creating a dedicated audio mix for your stream, you’re missing a huge opportunity to elevate your online experience. And if you are creating a separate mix, but relying on a latency-filled live stream to mix it, your adjustments will almost always come too late, once again leaving your viewers with second-rate audio.
With all of this in mind, real-time audio mixing isn’t just a nice to have, it’s essential if you want your audio to match the quality of the video that you’ve put so much time into perfecting. RemoteMix is here to help not only make this possible, but easier and more accessible than ever.
Try it out for yourself as a next step. It won’t take you long to hear the difference that real-time mixing can make.
