Issues with Audio Recording DAWs

S

sycobox

New Member
Hello!

I've been having this irritating issue with OBS where desktop audio capturing has been constantly disabling while recording. From what I've gathered, it seems that the desktop audio capture will disable whenever either of my daws (FL Studio 25.2 & Ableton Live 12.3) cpu overload temporarily. This has never happened before until about a month or so ago. I believe this might likely be a Mac OS 26 issue that has not been resolved yet. Any work arounds or fixes would be amazing!

Specs:
2022 Mac Book Pro
Apple M2 Pro (10-core CPU, 16-core GPU)
16gb Unified Memory
Mac OS Tahoe 26.3
 
The desktop audio source on Mac uses a CoreAudio process tap that can silently disconnect when the audio subsystem hiccups -- and it doesn't auto-reconnect, it just disables itself. A DAW CPU spike causing a brief audio dropout is exactly the kind of thing that severs the tap. A workaround that's worked for others is routing the DAW output through BlackHole (free virtual audio driver) and capturing that in OBS instead of using desktop audio capture directly, since BlackHole stays up even when the main audio session drops.
 
Thank you so much, I will take a look at that. Is this change to CoreAudio recent? I've only started having this problem right after updating to Tahoe.
 
Do your DAWs not create their own virtual output channels that OBS can use? That is, why are you using Desktop Audio source at all?
 
That doubling is probably because you have both BlackHole and desktop audio capture active at the same time, so OBS picks up the same signal twice. Remove the Desktop Audio source from Settings > Audio (set it to Disabled) and only keep the BlackHole Audio Input Capture as your source. Should fix it right away.
 
mishakim said:
Do your DAWs not create their own virtual output channels that OBS can use? That is, why are you using Desktop Audio source at all?
Click to expand...
They do not. The DAW outputs are limited to available devices connected to your system for audio output. Applications like black hole are the solution for this because ableton and other daws can't send audio to apps, unless that app specifically has a way to act as an entire audio output within the DAW. Black hole does that, but OBS does not. Similarly black hole can send audio directly to OBS, where ableton can not do that. To my knowledge.
Desktop audio is used because we are using OBS to also screen record/stream the DAW, so having the video and audio come through the same channel in OBS by using screen recording seems to be the most obvious way to do this.

But the CPU spikes or audio drop outs cause this horrible side effect of the audio being completely stopped and having to be rerouted. Which is SUPER annoying.
Thankfully there is a solution. Glad I found this forum, this has been driving me crazy today.
 
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