TelekinesticMan

New Member
I've been using various different audio tracks for OBS when recording gameplay footage. One for my mic, another for the game sound, and another for Discord voice calls. There's also a master track that combines all three into one for easier playback when scrubbing through all my different videos.

Unfortunately, sometimes my game audio gets heavily crackly and distorted - this is heard across the master (combined) track, and the solo game audio track. It never happens for my microphone or Discord audio, only ever the game. It's even happened to me while recording footage from my Nintendo Switch via Elgato HD60X capture card, with only one audio track enabled for nothing but the game sound.

Originally I was using a plugin for "Application Audio Output Capture", but after the crackling happened to me during a livestream, I switched over to the new official "Application Audio Capture BETA" already installed with OBS. It seemed to fix it at first, but now it's almost like a ticking time bomb, where sometime later in a recording, the crackling can occur again.

For example, I was playing Sea of Thieves with the Replay Buffer active and made two recording highlights. The first one was incredibly crackly, getting worse as it went along. The second one, from later in the same session, sounded just fine, for some reason. I was recording some Switch footage through the Elgato HD60X, with only the game sound included, and it started getting crackly during a long recording as well.

I am curious if this is related to some strange hardware issue, and I am building a new machine some time in the next week or so once the parts arrive, but this issue continues to perplex me in the meantime. It's also happened on Discord screen share, where after an hour or so of streaming a game to my friends, I have to manually restart the stream due to a loud crackling noise present in the game audio.

I've tried reinstalling Realtek audio drivers, updating OBS, verifying OBS, etc. but nothing has helped. Maybe my motherboard is dying, who knows. But it's a very inconsistent issue.

I've made a video showing some examples here - https://youtu.be/O7Al20XyhFM

I have also attached some screenshots of my simple setup. Remember, it can still happen even when I'm only using the HD60X capture card's audio on a single track, and nothing else. I have also upgraded to an RTX 4090 recently, and am using the AV1 encoder with MKV recordings, but this crackling was happening to me long before I changed GPUs.
 

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TelekinesticMan

New Member
Unfortunately no, however as I am now on a new PC it's been fine. It may have been a hardware issue and could be the same for you, so I hope you can find a fix!

I did actually run into a new issue recently on my new machine where my OBS internal framerate was dropping for no reason, even when it wasn't recording. I just had to make a new Profile from scratch to fix it.
 

aelius_l

New Member
Sending this message here as well since this thread is identical to this thread and this thread

Updating this with a quick note, but I nagged the #audio-support channel on the OBS Discord and was able to set up a tracelogging program with someone there. I managed to capture the bug happening on stream again today and was recording the events to a tracelog and sent that over along with the VOD, so hopefully we'll hear something about this issue sooner rather than later.
 

MapleStank

New Member
TLDR: Try changing the Sample Rate & Bit Depth in the Windows Sound control Panel to a lower setting. Windows usually defaults to something like "2 channel, 24 bit, 48000 Hz (Studio Quality)", the frequency being 48000 Hz. Changed mine to 44100 Hz and haven't had an audio issue since.

I had this problem with my new PC build. Games like Red Dead Online, Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi: Survivor would all kick in with this after a few minutes of play. I'm not 100% sure but I think it has something to do with the timing frequency of the audio device you're using for playback. In my case, I'm using the Corsair Virtuoso XT wireless headset. It defaulted to the 48000 Hz frequency I mentioned above. I singled out software updates, drivers and third-party utilities to ensure it wasn't something else being introduced to my machine.

For my setup, I use iCUE software to manage the mouse, keyboard and headphones. Having iCUE installed or not made no difference here, even with the default headphone drivers Windows fetches this problem was still happening. Finally, I made these changes in Windows 11 to fix the issue:
- Close OBS
- Open Windows Settings > System > Sound
- Scroll down to the Advanced section and choose "More Sound Settings"
- Find your default playback device on the list (green circle with white checkmark) double-click it to open properties.
- On the Advanced tab, note the current setting listed under "Default Format". Use the drop-down to see what other options are available, switch to another 24-bit frequency with a lower value. Press Apply & OK.
- (OPTIONAL) Check to see if you need to make any changes for the default communications device as well, if it's not also the default device. (green circle, white telephone) If it's not shown, your default device is also the default communications device.
- (OPTIONAL) You may want to change the default setting for Windows communication detection, which can lower the volume of your other applications while on voice calls. To modify this, switch to the Communications tab and choose the "Do nothing" option.
- Re-open OBS and check to make sure the sample rate matches what is now set in windows. Open File > Settings > Audio and look in the General box to the right to see what the current value is. Adjust if needed, then try your game again to see if the audio issues are fixed.

Good luck!
 
Last edited:

Kurazarrh

New Member
Resurrecting to post. This is definitely a bug in OBS, and there aren't a ton of great ways to work around it. This has been a serious thorn in my side with a lot of my recent recordings, and it usually happens around the 20-minute mark (and then also about 100 minutes later, on longer recordings), though it's not exact (can be anywhere from about 17:00 to 22:00, and it crackles for a total of about 30 seconds, with the crackling's severity slowly ramping up and then fading out).

Mitigation options include:

1) Major hardware update (something that comes with a new DAC) to roll the dice and see if OBS plays well with it. This option sucks.
2) Don't use Application Audio Output Capture (BETA). Use the desktop audio capture instead. This option sucks, too, unless you METICULOUSLY turn off all desktop notification sounds while recording.
3) Investigate the approximate timing of when this crackling/juddering audio starts, and then start your recordings/streams that much earlier. But this won't help if your recording is more than an hour or so; in my experience, the crackling repeats about every 100-120 minutes (with some variability in there).
4) Downgrade to OBS 27.2.4 and install the original win-capture-plugin plugin and use that instead. This option sucks if you have a screen resolution higher than 1080p (this gui is for ants!) or if you rely on features that weren't present in OBS 27.2.4.
5) Wait for OBS 30. Unfortunately, probably the best option unless #4 or #2 work for you.
 

Suslik V

Active Member
There is link to original issue (on github):

If you able to reproduce the issue, please follow the steps from:
For testing use latest available release of OBS (v30 RC1 as for today), files lies under the "Assets" spoiler:
 

BrokenArrow007

New Member
This started happening last night 1/2 way through my stream. Only on the track I use for Discord/TS3.
I take it a fix has never been found?
 

Suslik V

Active Member
...fix has never been found?
Not found. Because reason unknown.

If you able to reproduce the issue, please, try to test original MS solution too:
 

danki

New Member
greetings guys!
I suffered with this for a long time live in all the versions I ran on Windows 11,
The only solution I found was to use voicemeeter as the PC's default audio driver, then Obs no longer causes these problems, I know it's not the best of all worlds but it's an effective workaround

with this you can use the app's audio capture functions OBS

BR

saudações pessoal!
eu sofri muito tempo com isso na live em todas versões que rodei no windows 11 ,
a unica solução que encontrei foi utilizar o voicemeeter como driver de audio padrão do PC , ai o Obs não causa mais esses problemas , sei que não é o melhor dos mundos mas é um contorno efetivo

Dankixote TTv
 
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