Audio Static/Buzz in Recordings, but not on Streams. Help fix?

ZacClay

New Member
Hello! I am running OBS on a Macintosh computer. Here are the specs:
Screen Shot 2021-07-20 at 11.30.34 AM.png

I am using the most recent update of OBS (OBS 27.0.1).

Current problem that I noticed starting about a month ago, is that when I record using OBS, there is a layer of static added to all audio that makes it unusable. Both microphone and desktop capture. However, when I stream to Twitch, the audio comes through to Twitch perfectly clear and crisp, as if nothing's wrong.
None of the audio sources are clipping, so that can't be the problem. If it were, then the audio on Twitch would also be buzzing.

This hasn't happened before, and I'm guessing it has something to do with my recording settings? Thing is, I haven't changed my recording settings in months, and this problem only arose recently.

Here's where it gets even weirder. I recorded an example video of this unwanted buzzing and uploaded it to YouTube, so I could link it here for you guys to hear exactly what I'm talking about. Imagine my astonishment when I then played that YouTube video, to hear no buzzing. Perfectly clear audio on the YouTube video, even though the video I had just uploaded had clearly audible buzzing on my desktop playback.
So then, I recorded a video of me playing the first video. That video has the buzzing still. This is so confusing!

Here are those two videos. The first video is the one I recorded as an example, which actually has perfectly clean playback. Video 01
The second video is a recording of the recording, so you can hear what I hear when I playback on my desktop, and to confirm that I'm not insane. Video 02

I went back to previous OBS recordings of mine, recordings from months and months ago, and oddly enough, those are now also playing back with the static, when they were not before.
I've tried importing audio of one of these recordings to another program, like Logic Pro, to see if the static is audible there. It is. And after importing the static audio to Logic, I then exported it as a new file to see if the static would persist, and it does. So, somehow it's baked into the OBS recording, but gets removed when it's uploaded to YouTube or Twitch? This is so weird.

Here are my OBS recording and audio settings.
Screen Shot 2021-07-20 at 12.03.19 PM.png

Screen Shot 2021-07-20 at 12.03.42 PM.png

Screen Shot 2021-07-20 at 12.03.55 PM.png

Screen Shot 2021-07-20 at 12.04.02 PM.png

Help, pls.
 

ZacClay

New Member
Hey all! Quick update. On the OBS Discord, user Yoloverdose suggested using the program VLC (free, downloadable from the Internet) to playback my files, instead of using Mac OS' built-in Quicktime. Lo and behold, playing back the video file in a 3rd-party software such as VLC came out with clear audio.

To continue testing this theory, I imported the video into Adobe's Premiere Pro, which is also not a native Mac program. Audio is clean there too.

So it seems that there is some sort of bug interaction between OBS recordings and Mac OS playback systems. Quicktime and Logic Pro playback the audio with static, whereas every other program comes out clean. So until I can get a better fix for this problem, I'll be importing my videos into Premiere Pro or maybe Handbrake first and then working with them.

Still open to suggestions!
 

bwbecker

New Member
Thanks, @ZacClay! I had a similar problem that was driving me bonkers. Never occurred to me to suspect QuickTime Player. Playback in VLC or after importing into Camtasia was great!
 
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