1Before you begin
You'll need OBS Studio 28 or newer and your personal overlay URL. Find it in your dashboard under Channel Setup → Browser source URL and click Copy — it's unique to your channel and should be kept private.
2Add the Browser Source
- In the Sources dock, click + and choose Browser.
- Name it VoiceTips Overlay and click OK.
- Paste your overlay URL into the URL field.
- Set Width and Height to your canvas size, for example 1920 × 1080. The page is transparent wherever no card is showing, and the card goes where Overlay & Alerts → Card position puts it.
- Tick Control audio via OBS. Without it the clip plays on your computer's speakers instead of into your stream.
- Leave Shutdown source when not visible unticked, so the overlay stays connected when you switch scenes. (If you do tick it, nothing is lost: clips approved while it was off play when it comes back.)
- Back in your dashboard, open Channel Setup. The badge next to the URL should say Overlay connected. Click Send test clip: a sample card appears and three rising notes play.
3Route the audio
With Control audio via OBS ticked, a VoiceTips Overlay channel appears in the Audio Mixer. Make sure it isn't muted, and play the test clip to check the level. To control clip volume independently, right-click the channel and open Advanced Audio Properties.
4Position & size
Leave the source covering the whole canvas and choose where the card appears in your dashboard\'s Overlay & Alerts panel: bottom left, lower third, top center or center, with a slide, pop, typewriter or no entrance. The same panel turns the donor name and captions on or off and sets the clip volume; changes reach an open overlay as soon as you save. Add &theme=light to the end of your overlay URL if you want the light "Roman Plaster" card style instead of the default dark one.
5If the overlay gets stuck
The overlay keeps a live connection open to VoiceTips, so clips play moments after you approve them. It reconnects on its own after a network drop, and clips approved while it was offline wait their turn and play, in order, once it is back. Clips play one at a time and never cut each other off.
To hold clips for a while (a cutscene, a sponsor read), click Pause overlay at the top of the Moderation Queue. The clip on air finishes, nothing new starts, and Resume overlay picks up where it left off.
Scenes. While you are on a scene that does not include the VoiceTips source (a "Be right back" screen, say), new clips wait and play when you switch back. One limit, from OBS itself: a source you have just added (or just refreshed) only starts hearing about scene switches once its scene has been switched back to; after OBS restarts, every switch is reported. And hiding the source with the eye icon is never reported, so a hidden source still plays clips. To hold clips for certain, use Pause overlay.
If the overlay still seems stuck, go to your dashboard's Overlay & Alerts panel and click ↻ Re-sync with OBS. This tells the overlay to reload itself and reconnect from scratch. It doesn't interrupt anything else in OBS.
6Troubleshooting
- Nothing plays. Check the badge at the top of the Moderation Queue. No overlay connected means OBS is not loading the URL: copy it again from Channel Setup. Overlay paused means click Resume. A clip marked up next plays as soon as the one before it finishes; a clip on a tier set to Queue waits in the Approved lane until you click Play now.
- A clip says the overlay could not play it. It did not air and is not counted as played. The card says why; fix that and click Try again. "The browser blocked autoplay" means the URL was opened in an ordinary browser tab rather than in OBS.
- No sound. Check Control audio via OBS is ticked, the Audio Mixer channel isn't muted, and monitoring is set correctly. Send a test clip to check.
- Overlay stopped updating. Use the Re-sync with OBS button above — it's faster and more reliable than manually refreshing the source in OBS.
- Still stuck. Right-click the source in OBS and choose Refresh, or remove and re-add it with the same URL.