Audio crackling of only the game sound after about 90min

[CyberSarge]

Hey guys. I am having a problem with audio crackling on my stream.
I currently use a scene in my streams that has 3 different audio sources: My mic, a source for discord audio and a source for game audio. I capture the audio for discord and the game via the win-capture-audio plugin (https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/win-capture-audio.1338/). This was never a problem until I upgraded my PC.
On this new machine, after around 90min of streaming, only the game audio starts to sound distorted. This is only audible in the stream. For me, I can hear everything perfectly fine. If I reset the captured audio, then the distortion also vanishes for another ~90min.
I have a short clip of how it sounds. The game audio in this clip sounds fine at the beginning, but gets more distorted over the duration of the clip.

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I saw people already posting about this kind of issue, but the suggested fixes didn't work for me. This is what I already tried:
- setting the sample rate in Audio > General to different values
- used wizard to configure optimal settings for streaming
- set audio bitrate from 320 to 160 to match my other tracks
- upgraded to version 32
- downgraded to version 28
- used a supposedly updated version of the win-capture-audio plugin as the original is 3 years old

Here is the log file for the stream in question from which I extracted the clip from:

https://obsproject.com/logs/6pRaQWc1I6vmH8qz

Also, here is my hardware in case this matters:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 4080 Super
- Mainboard: MAG B650 Tomahawk WIFI
- RAM: 32 GB DDR5

I appreciate any help, I just don't know where to look anymore.

 

[prgmitchell]

1) this is a windows bug that was only fixed in Windows 11 24H2 so you'd need to update your windows install
2) the plugin is long abandoned and still has other buffering/crackling issues, use the built in application audio capture source instead

 

[CyberSarge]

That is unfortunate. I don't plan on upgrading to Windows 11. Is it known if the built-in application audio capture will work on win10 or am I out of luck here?

 

[prgmitchell]

yes as I mentioned it was a Windows bug that was fixed by Microsoft and only in Windows 11.....Windows 10 is EOL at this point, it came out 10 years ago and Windows 11 has been out for over 4 years so it is pretty mature. the list of things like this will only continue to grow over time most likely.