Crackling sounds during all recording! I've tried everything!

[Dan Brown]

Hi,
My current OBS set up is, somehow, including crackling in every recording I do. I have a very good (new) high powered Dell computer, the best of everything as far as gear, Windows 11. I get the crackling even if I create a scene with only one audio source (so just the microphone, for example), and nothing else whatsoever. The gains are set appropriately, with no clipping. But the crackling is there no matter what I record (voice, piano, or tracks from Studio One). All of the global audio devices are disabled. I am set at sample rate of 48, as is all of my other gear. My main goal is to record Studio One tracks to OBS, but the crackling here is very bad! And, this problem seems to be intermittent. I never noticed it till recently. My video recording format is MKV. I have a brand new Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 interface that works flawlessly (best interface I've ever used). So, I'm sure the problem lies only in OBS, and I'm spending hours searching for the cause! Any suggestions would be highly appreciated! Thank you!

 

[John Hartman]

Can you post a short example MKV here? Different people might use "crackling" to describe a bunch of different issues.

Are you using any audio filters in OBS? If so, does turning them off change the crackle?

Is it level dependent? Does it crackle if there is no sound on the mic? Does it crackle at low levels, or only as you get louder? Etc.

 

[AaronD]

I get the crackling even if I create a scene with only one audio source (so just the microphone, for example), and nothing else whatsoever.

Some systems are so bad with audio that they just do that. They're literally not keeping up, with barely any system load at all.

The gains are set appropriately, with no clipping.

How are you measuring that? On a single meter that is less than full? That's not a good test, because something can clip early in the chain and then you turn it down later, and the meter is after all that...

Also, I had a weird issue a year or two ago, that turned out to be a bug in an old library that I was using on Linux, that had already been fixed but it hadn't trickled down to me yet. So the fix for me was simply to grab the updated version of that library, and put some code in my system update script to go back to that newer version every time the updater "fixed it" with what it knew.

Anyway, the bug basically took the lower 16 bits of a 24-bit stream, and passed that on as a 16-bit stream. So if I had the interface turned waay down to not use the top 8 bits, it was fine, and effectively put the usable full-scale at the converters' -48dBFS or so, but as soon as it started to use the 17th and higher bits, it would "wrap around", which immediately sounds horrendous! Far worse than normal clipping!

My main goal is to record Studio One tracks to OBS...

Is there a reason you can't use a video editor after the fact? Record a scratch track in OBS just for alignment, then add the real one in the editor and mute the scratch?

It's not quite as nice of a workflow, but at least it gets you going.