Audio Looping Issue on Mac with OBS – Need Help

[hopmedia]

I use OBS to record services at my church, and I’m running it on a Mac Mini (recently purchased) with the latest version of macOS Sequoia (15.6 i believe). I’ve been encountering a recurring issue: occasionally, during a live recording, the audio starts to loop partway through the video, and then all audio is lost for the remainder of the recording. What’s frustrating is that this issue isn't detectable during the live recording because OBS still shows audio levels moving, so there's no indication anything is wrong until I play back the video. This has led to several recordings missing large chunks of audio, which is very unreliable, especially since our recordings typically run 45 minutes to an hour. I have been cutting the audio every 10 mins just to make sure it isn't happening !

I've noticed this tends to happen most often after a macOS or OBS update pops up. To troubleshoot, I’ve tried restarting the computer, updating/downgrading OBS & Sequoia, and even rolling back macOS updates to test compatibility. But I still seem to run into a new glitch almost every month.

The team that installed our system said they typically use Dell systems for church setups running OBS, citing better compatibility with the software. Before considering the expense of switching to a different system, I wanted to ask:

• Has anyone else experienced similar audio issues with OBS on a Mac?
• Are there known compatibility problems with macOS Sequoia and the latest OBS versions?
• Dell versus Mac?
• Any workarounds or settings I should check to prevent audio looping or loss?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[mishakim]

No problems like that here, but not entirely sure what you're describing. By "looping", do you mean the audio output is coming back in as an input? That would cause OBS to mute that input, so that could be your problem. But figuring it out requires more information, mainly, what is your audio setup? How is audio coming into the computer, and into OBS? What outputs are you using, if any?

In general, OBS does not have great tools for handling audio, and the best practice is to use separate software for that, i.e, a DAW, to manage all your audio sources and the mix, and make sure the only stream going to OBS is the final mix you want in the recording. That said, I do manage audio within OBS, because I have only two inputs via a Motu M4, and the latest versions of OBS do let you choose which channels from your DI to assign to a given OBS audio input.