Audio Distortion in Recordings, Please Help!

[BeerBelliedBear]

I have found an audio distortion in my game recording several times. It is intermittent and I don't realize it's occurring until I watch the recording back. The sound going to my headphones while I play the game is not distorted. I have tried to ensure that all of my audio is set for 48KHz and the recording tracks have the highest bitrate option. My video recording bitrate is set to variable (VBR) between 6,000 and 50,000. Please advise me on what is going wrong; I'm currently out of ideas for fixing this.

Here is a clip that includes the distortion: https://youtu.be/4piYceWKTT8

Attached is my log file.

 

[BeerBelliedBear]

Anyone? I'm eager to resolve this issue. ^_^;

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

That is an ANCIENT 10 generation old CPU trying to do computationally intensive real-time video work, granted certain portion largely offloaded to GPU, but you also have CPU impactful chroma-key ???
log shows audio buffer increasing, which I'm guessing is due to system overload? but could be something else...

I recommend monitoring hardware resource (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk I/O, etc) utilization [for ex. using Task manager’s Performance tab and/or Resource Monitor] to see if your system is being maxed out with your settings https://obsproject.com/wiki/General-Performance-and-Encoding-Issues and https://obsproject.com/wiki/GPU-overload-issues
Beware CPU impactful settings, filters, effects, plugins, etc... I see a number of settings that could be pushing such an old into overload..

Personally, I'd expect you also need to make sure your OS (Win10) is optimized [and not following snake oil advice from fools who have no idea what they are talking about]. I tend to use VDI setup guides as a starting pointing. And that includes basic of making sure no unnecessary background tasks. And you may need to up the CPU priority level of OBS Studio to ensure it takes enough CPU cycles

 

[BeerBelliedBear]

That is an ANCIENT 10 generation old CPU trying to do computationally intensive real-time video work, granted certain portion largely offloaded to GPU, but you also have CPU impactful chroma-key ???
log shows audio buffer increasing, which I'm guessing is due to system overload? but could be something else...

I recommend monitoring hardware resource (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk I/O, etc) utilization [for ex. using Task manager’s Performance tab and/or Resource Monitor] to see if your system is being maxed out with your settings https://obsproject.com/wiki/General-Performance-and-Encoding-Issues and https://obsproject.com/wiki/GPU-overload-issues
Beware CPU impactful settings, filters, effects, plugins, etc... I see a number of settings that could be pushing such an old into overload..

Personally, I'd expect you also need to make sure your OS (Win10) is optimized [and not following snake oil advice from fools who have no idea what they are talking about]. I tend to use VDI setup guides as a starting pointing. And that includes basic of making sure no unnecessary background tasks. And you may need to up the CPU priority level of OBS Studio to ensure it takes enough CPU cycles

Thank you for the reply! Yep, my CPU is ancient, but I've got it clocked at a static 4.4GHz on all 6 cores (12 threads). I was under the impression I shouldn't have problems with recording Minecraft gameplay with this CPU, but I bet you're right about me overloading it. XD I believe I was led astray by reading others saying things like, "Unused scenes don't interfere with recordings." When in reality, it seems my unused scenes are being prepped in the background, so that I can switch to them on the fly.

I have Rainmeter constantly on my second monitor. Occasionally a single thread makes it to 100% usage. Average thread usage never comes close to maxing out. Here's is what it looked like while recording gameplay before I made any of the changes listed below:

I read the article you linked, thank you for that! (Heads up: both links lead to the same article.) I have now:
- turned off Game Bar
- closed my browser
- removed the chroma keyed scene elements and the video filters from my scenes (which probably doesn't matter now, since I also:)
- created a new scene collection with only the scene I need for recording gameplay, no extra elements
- set OBS to run in administrator mode
- changed OBSs CPU priority from normal to high
- disabled studio mode

I'm not very familiar with which parts of OBS and scenes have high CPU impact. I appreciate your insight. You mentioned seeing a number of settings that could be pushing my CPU too hard; could I trouble you to please look at my latest log file and tell me specifically if the things you identified still remain? I have attached it below. Here is my Rainmeter graph (while recording) after the changes (the blue spike is where I tabbed out to get this still):

 

[BeerBelliedBear]

As for optimizing Windows, there is only so much I know about the OS, but I did my best. I don't remember everything I've done in the years I've had this PC, but I have at least:
- Enabled Game Mode, since my windows version is recent
- Gone through running services and changed to disabled or manual several things, like: Windows Search, Office Click-to-Run, Windows Backup, Connected User Experience and Telemetry, SysMain...
- Enabled automatic page file allocation, currently it's 4864MB
- Disabled mouse pointer shadow and trail
- Enabled hardware accelerated GPU scheduling
- Set a high performance graphics preference for Minecraft
- Set power options advanced settings to high performance
- Set processor power management to 100% for the minimum and maximum
- Set desktop background as a single still image
- Updated drivers for everything

For reference, info that isn't in the log file:
I'm running my OS on a 1TB NVME drive with 3,400/2,800 MB/s read/write.

 

[Suslik V]

...audio distortion in my game recording... I don't realize it's occurring until I watch the recording back. The sound going to my headphones while I play the game is not distorted.

12:06:09.701: Windows Version: 10.0 Build 19045 (release: 22H2; revision: 5247; 64-bit)
...
12:06:10.591:     win-capture-audio.dll
...
12:06:11.388:     - source: 'Game Audio' (audio_capture)
...

You are run into issue known as:

[Application Audio Capture (beta)] Sound becomes noisy after a long time · Issue #8064 · obsproject/obs-studio

Operating System Info Windows 10 Other OS No response OBS Studio Version 29.0.0 OBS Studio Version (Other) No response OBS Studio Log URL https://obsproject.com/logs/oF4ofzG6VIEKsq24 and https://ob...

github.com

it affects all solutions that uses same technologies from Microsoft. You are using "win-capture-audio.dll" plugin, so it's your case too. Only OS update may help (or don't use sound separation).

 

[BeerBelliedBear]

12:06:09.701: Windows Version: 10.0 Build 19045 (release: 22H2; revision: 5247; 64-bit)
...
12:06:10.591:     win-capture-audio.dll
...
12:06:11.388:     - source: 'Game Audio' (audio_capture)
...

You are run into issue known as:

[Application Audio Capture (beta)] Sound becomes noisy after a long time · Issue #8064 · obsproject/obs-studio

Operating System Info Windows 10 Other OS No response OBS Studio Version 29.0.0 OBS Studio Version (Other) No response OBS Studio Log URL https://obsproject.com/logs/oF4ofzG6VIEKsq24 and https://ob...

github.com

it affects all solutions that uses same technologies from Microsoft. You are using "win-capture-audio.dll" plugin, so it's your case too. Only OS update may help (or don't use sound separation).

Thank you very much for sharing this. My CPU isn't eligible for a Win11 upgrade. I guess it's time to pick a Linux distribution.