Hi Audio Phoenix, as others will say, welcome!
I’d guess feature requests are best placed under feedback reports for the relevant thing you want it added to, wherever that may be. I’d suspect this is aimed at the VRChat World SDK.
As a fellow DJ and musician with some audio engineering experience, I can understand your feature request. I also have a third-generation Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 in my studio, though as popular as they are, I rarely use mine because of its limitations of being USB2 and awful lag. Worth a look is their Clarett+ which is USB3, zero lag , clean sounds regardless how many tracks you throw at it, and can power your headphones, but I digress…
Apologies for the long and detailed answer, I’m going from my own experience here how I deal with the same issues, in the hopes it helps…
The good news is, most of what your asking already exists. Unity, the VRChat world SDK, and Oculus SDK have these things. How accessible they are to you, depends on how you’re getting your signal into VRChat, and how accommodating the world/venue you’re performing in can stream it, though technically some of this out of our control… Everyone’s setup is going to be different.
On the first request, inputs, sorry the onus is on you for this one. If you haven’t invested in a mixer, and just using the Scarlett’s 2 in’s and outs for monitoring, then all you have is the USB from it going into your computer – it’s an audio interface giving you 24bit 192k, which may be okay in most, but not all circumstances. You provide the final mixdown, the mixing is done long before it gets online to the world… You chose to provide it as mono, stereo, 3.1, 5.1, or full immersive 360 degree sound, whatever your gear is capable of and appropriate for your set.
If you need more inputs, then your ASIO drivers and/or mixer should be doing the heavy lifting on your end, If you’re thinking of trying to remux 4 individual channels in real time, the Internet just doesn’t work that way, unfortunately your audio would lose sync and drift all over the place like musicians who can’t keep time with each other, believe me I’ve tried it.
Nevertheless, once you get your source outs the way you want them, you then route that like you would to any other web streaming platform, such as Twitch or YouTube, passing through something like OBS. Most inworld TVs will accept this type of stream and play it without issue, and it will sound great for everyone.
(As an aside, I’ve asked for Shoutcast support, but that’s another topic).
As a last resort perhaps, some people will pipe their sound through their VR headset or desktop mic input in lieu of doing a proper stream, so instead of voice you’re hearing the person’s computer mix. IMHO it’s going to sound pretty awful since it was made for voice and never designed for high quality audio, that and due to earmuffs or personal volume sliders you can’t really guarantee everyone will hear you. (Hence another reason we use world audio instead).
Which brings us to request #2 – I don’t know about Vive or index users, but this is indeed built into the Oculus SDK. Some desktop users may have fully spatial sound while others could be completely mono with one speaker, there’s no telling who has what, but you can indeed pipe spatial data through the world SDK as well control your output range. We are talking world audio, the VRC Spatial Audio component can be added to or removed from any audio source in the world. You can pan these, change gain, add effects, define the range and priorities of sounds over each other, dial it in as you like, however, it is done on the Unity end of it for the world map, and the world builder would need to set this up for you ahead of time if you had special considerations, unless they code in sliders to make these accessible in real time. Check out the SDK docs, there’s a lot there to consider.
For request #3 we have the earmuffs indicator in the client, but it’s up to the world maker to setup audio zones for how the world or other audio performs. I suppose a world maker could put in sliders or toggles of sorts or draw out the distance of the audio zones, though usually if you’re at a venue, a reasonable person is going to be able to hear the performer and could get muted and reported if they’re being disruptive while a live concert is going on. If they don’t want to hear the music they can, as you say, just mute or dial it down, it’s their choice really, I’ve seen some clubs that have quiet zones (or designated separate voice zones), but again as with request #2 it’s really up to the world maker to build this.
I haven’t been to a lot of clubs yet myself, though most seem to just have a simple media player that they can lock down as needed, and that seems to work.
This is an interesting and important topic for me, I hope others chime in with additional input, perhaps we can all come to a good consensus and build out a guide for world makers, how to give the best venue for the many live performers out there? Or a guide for non-technical musicians, to setup their studio for playing within VRChat? Thus far, I haven’t really seen any official documentation or recommendations on this; Most of what I’ve learned has been word of mouth from other musicians and DJs.