May 23, 2024

Mac noalbs installation

The following are the Mac specific details for Naginreed’s IRL guide.

4.2.a – Download NOALBS for your System (it will be a .tar archive file in the Downloads folder). Double-clicking the file will unpack the file into a folder of the same name as the filename (without the extension). Rename that folder to NOALBS.

Open your home user folder (Click “Go” from the Finder, and select “Home”). Create a new folder; something like Stream or Streaming for example.

Move (click and drag) the NOALBS folder from the above step into this new folder (in this example, the Streaming folder).

4.2.b – Open the NOALBS folder in the Finder (above). Inside this folder you should have these 4 files (the .env file will not display by default on a Mac; the env file here was simply renamed from .env to env just for display purposes).

Sometimes .env will not show or download due to the . in the name .env Just download it from here again and place it in the same folder.

4.2.c – Open up a Terminal Window like the above (the Terminal application is located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder) and enter the command cd /Users/yourusername/yourfoldername/NOALBS where yourusername = your username on the Mac and yourfoldername = the name of the folder you created and moved the NOALBS folder into. In this example, it would be “cd /Users/murasama/Streaming/NOALBS”. Then hit Enter/Return and type mv env .env and hit Enter/Return. The env file should now vanish in Finder. (You can show it in Finder by pressing Command + Shift + . )

Performing a directory listing should look like the above.

Since noalbs is not a code signed executable, it will be flagged by Gatekeeper (not allowed to run). In order to get around that, it needs to be initially launched by right-clicking on it from the Finder, and selecting Open. The following dialog box will be displayed. Click the Open button (this normally isn’t recommended since it does circumvent the default security mechanisms in macOS; this however is the only way to run noalbs on the Mac).

A terminal window will open that looks like the following. That process will terminate since it will fail to read in the configuration files (this is normal and can be ignored).

** the above can be added before: 4.2.c – For NOALBS to respond to our Chat commands we need to give access to a Twitch Account. Once you logged in with your preferred Account in Twitch click on this Link, then hit Connect and copy the oauth:xxxxxxx Code.

Background information: noalbs is a multiplatform (Linux/Unix, Mac, Windows) command line binary that allows remote control of OBS via chat commands as well as sampling of the bitrate of the stream in order to determine loss of signal (LOS) and low bitrate situations where the software will automatically perform a scene switch on OBS, and then go back to the live scene once the LOS and/or low bitrate situation clears.

All of this is configurable via a text file (as a command line app, there is no graphical user interface for the program itself and its settings).

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