Question / Help Audio dropouts when recording

[Drake5000]

I'm wondering if anyone's had luck figuring this out.

I'm getting dropouts every few minutes (i.e. on average every 1:30 to 2:45) in all OBS recordings. With few exceptions each of these dropouts (see image below) is exactly 21ms in length.

I'm recording audio at 48kHz to 192kbps AAC in an MKV wrapper. Dropouts only occur in the audio... not the video.

I'm using an AJA U-TAP SDI to capture audio and video and I've confirmed these dropouts don't happen when I record a WAV file directly from the device... only when recording in OBS.

Any thoughts? Solutions? Additional avenues of investigation?

@Steely74 ... any luck on your end?

P.S. The OBS logs look clean. No sign of problems.

View attachment 61791

Hey! I got literally same problem with my Behringer UMC204HD and OBS. These drop-outs look absolutely same as yours on spectrogram! Both Reaper and Adobe Audition recordings are clean! 20ms length as well! Have you found any solution? @dpower

 

[rockbottom]

I've been testing vMix since yesterday, there's a bit of a learning curve but so far so good. Streamed & recorded for about 12 hours & not a single audio dropout in any of the recordings.

 

[DSITech]

I was getting frequent short drops causing stuttering audio while recording. Running with a Samson Go Mobile Mic and a Fuji Xt200 through a Cam-link. The fix is that after everything is up, select the Fuji in the source list and Deactivate => Activate. Can't explain it but it works. It's now part of the ritual.

 

[StifflersMom]

Hi,

I'm watching this thread for a long time because I have the same problem with OBS and a Soundblaster x-Fi.
At 50 FPS there are ~23ms drops every ~9 Min with 27.1.3 and every ~6 Min with 27.0.1.
I use OBS for a hobby radio station and serval DJs from our station have the same problem with various sound devices.
I noticed also that many steamers on twitch have this audio drops, too.

Now the funny part:
I noticed that some DJs never had this audio drops. So I asked the DJs to get their audio device type.
All DJs with a Realtek HD Audio devices NEVER have drops.
The other DJs with serval different audio devices (soundblaster, behringer usb, Intel HD audio, AMD HD audio, LEAGY USB, ...) have this drops.

Also most of them tested other recording / streaming software without having Problems at all.

I have a Soundblaster x-Fi and a Realtek HD Audio device (onboard).
Since I switched to line in of the realtek device, there are no mor problems.

For me, this gives the following facts:
- The problem is related to OBS in any way to the audio device handling, because it doesn't occure with other software
- The problem is not related to CPU usage or disk usage
- The times of the drops are different with 27.0.1 and less in relation to 27.1.3
- The Problem does not occure on a Realtek HD audio device (if the device drivers are installed!!!)
- The Problem occures also on Realtek HD audio devices, when you NOT install the realtek drivers and Windows installs a compatible driver

May be someone of you has also a mainboard with Realtek HD audio device and can confirm, that there are no drops if using it?

 

[Kamos80]

Hi,

I'm watching this thread for a long time because I have the same problem with OBS and a Soundblaster x-Fi.
At 50 FPS there are ~23ms drops every ~9 Min with 27.1.3 and every ~6 Min with 27.0.1.
I use OBS for a hobby radio station and serval DJs from our station have the same problem with various sound devices.
I noticed also that many steamers on twitch have this audio drops, too.

Now the funny part:
I noticed that some DJs never had this audio drops. So I asked the DJs to get their audio device type.
All DJs with a Realtek HD Audio devices NEVER have drops.
The other DJs with serval different audio devices (soundblaster, behringer usb, Intel HD audio, AMD HD audio, LEAGY USB, ...) have this drops.

Also most of them tested other recording / streaming software without having Problems at all.

I have a Soundblaster x-Fi and a Realtek HD Audio device (onboard).
Since I switched to line in of the realtek device, there are no mor problems.

For me, this gives the following facts:
- The problem is related to OBS in any way to the audio device handling, because it doesn't occure with other software
- The problem is not related to CPU usage or disk usage
- The times of the drops are different with 27.0.1 and less in relation to 27.1.3
- The Problem does not occure on a Realtek HD audio device (if the device drivers are installed!!!)
- The Problem occures also on Realtek HD audio devices, when you NOT install the realtek drivers and Windows installs a compatible driver

May be someone of you has also a mainboard with Realtek HD audio device and can confirm, that there are no drops if using it?

I confirm: no problems with Realteck basic soundcard, but same dropouts with Clarett 8pre both using ASIO or standard drivers.

 

[Don Sloan]

I'm have similar problems with OBS audio dropouts using a Behringer UMC404HD into an HP EliteDesk 800 G6 desktop with an i7 processor running Windows 10 and the Behringer windows driver version 5.0.

.

The audio dropouts occur about every 21 seconds with a dropout duration of 70 milliseconds. I would appreciate any ideas as to what could be causing these. Thanks!

 

[Don Sloan]

Seems no one has a solution to the 70 msec audio dropouts with OBS and a Behringer UMC404HD. Is this thread too old? How about any advice on some different interface equipment and windows driver that doesn't have this problem, please? Thanks.

 

[rockbottom]

Hi,

I'm watching this thread for a long time because I have the same problem with OBS and a Soundblaster x-Fi.
At 50 FPS there are ~23ms drops every ~9 Min with 27.1.3 and every ~6 Min with 27.0.1.
I use OBS for a hobby radio station and serval DJs from our station have the same problem with various sound devices.
I noticed also that many steamers on twitch have this audio drops, too.

Now the funny part:
I noticed that some DJs never had this audio drops. So I asked the DJs to get their audio device type.
All DJs with a Realtek HD Audio devices NEVER have drops.
The other DJs with serval different audio devices (soundblaster, behringer usb, Intel HD audio, AMD HD audio, LEAGY USB, ...) have this drops.

Also most of them tested other recording / streaming software without having Problems at all.

I have a Soundblaster x-Fi and a Realtek HD Audio device (onboard).
Since I switched to line in of the realtek device, there are no mor problems.

For me, this gives the following facts:
- The problem is related to OBS in any way to the audio device handling, because it doesn't occure with other software
- The problem is not related to CPU usage or disk usage
- The times of the drops are different with 27.0.1 and less in relation to 27.1.3
- The Problem does not occure on a Realtek HD audio device (if the device drivers are installed!!!)
- The Problem occures also on Realtek HD audio devices, when you NOT install the realtek drivers and Windows installs a compatible driver

May be someone of you has also a mainboard with Realtek HD audio device and can confirm, that there are no drops if using it?

Confirmed!

With my Z170 I was using a Asus Xonar Essence STX soundcard. With my new Z690 that I built myself, I made sure to get a mobo with excellent on board audio & I'm using it. No more dropouts. Recordings made with OBS & Audacity now stay in perfect sync no matter how long the recording is.

 

[Don Sloan]

I finally removed the Behringer UMC404HD audio interface and replaced it with a Focusrite 2i2 and that has ended the problem with audio dropouts on OBS. Also tried a Focusrite 4i4 with similar success. Not sure where the problem was but I believe that OBS has issues with the windows 10 driver supplied with the Behringer UMC interface. OBS doesn't support the ASIO driver and it seems it doesn't work well with the Behringer Windows 10 driver either, resulting in the audio dropouts I saw.

 

[cyclemat]

i had no problem with the behringer asio driver of my UMC1820
its looks for me more than you have an usb bandwitch problem.

 

[floele]

Just in case anyone else stumbles upon this issue: You're probably experiencing a known problem, which is currently being worked on: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/4600
There are also test builds available so if anyone wants to check if the changes fix the problem, feedback is welcome.

 

[sl85]

Hi, I am using a UMC204HD with Windows 11 on an i7 and still getting the occasional short audio dropouts in OBS only. Is this still a known problem being worked on?

 

[rockbottom]

This may be helpful for some, post 7.

Audio glitches and losses

Multiple times per stream I get an audio glitch that happens both on the microphone capture and on the desktop audio capture: Randomly, every couple of minutes, OBS loses about 20ms of audio, resulting in a noticeable click: The same problem with a spectrogram viewer: To simplify testing, I...

obsproject.com

 

[LastofAvari]

I had this problem that was driving me nuts and, as far as I've figured it out, OBS really doesn't like ASIO drivers. Or some of them at least (I have Audient iD4 MkII interface). The thing that helped me is Voicemeeter. It's software that creates a virtual audio device and passes through hardware and virtual inputs into it, so I've routed iD4 into that and selected Voicemeeter virtual recording device as Mic/Aux input. It solved my problems as far as I can tell, but I may need some more extensive testing to be 110% sure.

I should've bought a USB mic to avoid all this problems, but oh, well... I didn't know OBS incapable of dealing with ASIO drivers being present in the system even if it doesn't use them at all.

 

[dizzyweird]

Hey together,

I also ran into this problem and fixed it by turning my device timestamps off.
I am using a Steinberg UR22C audio interface and either I turned the timestamps on myself or they were set already.

You can find the tickbox by double-clicking on your audio-input-device and then uncheck it.

I assume that obs has its own recording timestamps and as soon as they dont match with the ones of the audio device anymore, obs will try to sync the audiosamples to the right position. Depending how big your buffer-size is, it happens more or less often.

If you uncheck the hardware/device timestamps, your interface should just send data without its internal timestamp and so OBS is using the audio as soon as it gets it-> no syncing needed, no weird dropouts.

Let me know if that worked for you!