Audio distortion in OBS to Zoom - using VirtualCam and VB Cable

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YannaUsagi

New Member
Hi!

I run my UU church's Zoom services on Sunday mornings. I also work at a theatre that does Zoom theatre, so my stage manager helped me get set up. I'm using OBS with the Virtual Cam plugin in order to cast my OBS to the Zoom meeting. I do this to share videos of music, hymns, and children's content. I use VB Cable as a virtual microphone to capture the sound.

This all works fine, except that we're getting a really weird and annoying audio distortion from the videos. The audio is understandable, and it sounds better when we share something that is just talking, but when we share music, it sort of fades in and out very subtly with a bit of a crackle. It drives our music guy crazy. I spent about two hours yesterday messing with settings without really understanding what I was doing, and nothing seemed to change. I'm very new to OBS, so I mostly understand the basics that I need to run things, as explained by our very excellent stage manager, but I'm honestly not sure what a lot of the settings do.

Anyone have any ideas on what I could do to smooth out the audio?

 
Patrick Ewalt

Patrick Ewalt

Member
Try a couple things real quick (there's more but let's see if we can alleviate the problem off the bat)...

1. Run OBS as Admin (right click the shortcut and click "run as administrator")
2. In VBCable/Voicemeeter make sure the cable is set to 48Khz sample rate, right now it is 44.1Khz while everything else is 48Khz, you really want parity to avoid the kinds of issues you are having, which sounds like what this is exactly), do this BEFORE opening OBS.

Post another logfile after doing that and let us know the results as well... then we can move on to optimizing the rest of your OBS setup... one of which may be to update your windows if it allows it to the latest 2004 update...

Good luck, talk to you soon!

Patrick Ewalt / SPIKEYPUP
 
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YannaUsagi

New Member
Thank you so much for the advice! (Sorry it took me so long to get around to following it; I've been under the weather this week.)

I did these things, and it does seem to have improved the problem, though not removed it. We also realized that the minister wasn't muting her mic when we played the videos through OBS, and now that she's doing that, this also minimizes some of the audio feedback. We're still getting the volume slightly phasing in and out. The music director describes it as listening to a badly compressed .mp3 that you downloaded from Kazaa in the early '00s. When I do a straight screenshare from my computer through Zoom without passing through OBS, the audio distortion disappears. So it's definitely something in the OBS set-up.

Here's my new log file! I do hope that I actually properly changed the settings in VB Cable. It prompted me to reboot my computer, so I think it took.

 
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fryeguy315

New Member
My audio in obs is peaking in the mid yellows (around -15db) the windows mic volume is from a mixer into a USB sound card and is set to 100% original sound is on in zoom set to high if, stereo option is off.
 
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fryeguy315

New Member
I am not sure what you mean by “what interface did you use” i have voicemeeter banana and the levels look “normal” in it. but I am routing the audio from the mixer board into the computer and into obs studio. I have it filtered in obs then it goes from obs via the obs monitor and output in the advanced audio options to vb cable a, then into zoom from vb cable. I am routing sound to my speakers from zoom through voicemeeter. I will give recording it a try. It may take a couple of weeks to accomplish.
 
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