Mic Audio stutters in OBS when Elgato's Game Capture HD is also running.

[Crossfader]

I have a sort of dedicated PC for streaming, it has an Elgato HD60 Pro card and a Steinberg UR22 mkII audio interface. I have recently started streaming and am learning the ropes as I go along.

My television is kind of far from my PC so I can't use it for playing because otherwise I wouldn't be able to see chat and there is no way to bring my mic there. So for now I have been using OBS to play. My current setup is one of the screens on my PC has the restream chat window, and the other has OBS but the window for the game is kinda small so certain games are difficult to play.

I know I can use Game Capture HD and it will use fullscreen so I can play the game easier but every time I start it, the mic on OBS starts to cut off.
It will cut off for periods of 0.5 to 2 seconds, in random intervals ranging from 10 seconds to 1 min.

After doing some research online, I found out it could be both software programs fighting for the mic, so I changed the audio input on the Game Capture HD to Stereo Mix but nothing changed with the stuttering. I restarted the Game Capture HD so it would start with Stereo Mix and there would be no conflict but the Mic still stuttered.

I then installed Voicemeeter and had the mic go through it, and have OBS use Voicemeeter as the input and when I started Game Capture HD, the stuttering was gone....... but shortly the audio crashed, there was no audio on the PC, youtube would not load any video saying there was audio driver issues, and when I restarted Voicemeeter, it kept on teeling me it had audio driver corruptions. I deleted Voicemeeter, restarted PC, installed it again, same crap happened again and again.

Sorry for the long post everyone, but does anyone know why there is mic conflict between Game Capture HD and OBS ?

All I want is to stream and be able to use one of my monitors whole screen to play some games and not have my mic stutter.

 

[Crossfader]

I forgot to mention that when I only open OBS, the mic works flawlessly. When I open Game Capture HD and then open OBS, the stuttering happens but the period of time the mic is off is barely a sec. and the intervals it happens are usually 2 min + .
When I open OBS and then I open Game Capture HD is when it gets bad, frequent mic interruptions with a mic being off for periods of 2 seconds, and even when I shut down Game Capture HD, it still occurs with similar frequency. I need to close OBS and start it again for the symptoms to disappear.

And this happens regardless if video is being captured.

Hope that helps.

 

[Crossfader]

I have some more clues, maybe this will give someone a hint into my problems.

I was checking some videos on youtube and in one of the various OBS audio problem videos, someone mentioned devices with different sampling rates, so I checked OBS and said 48k HZ, and my UR22mkII was at 44.1k HZ, and I changed it to 48k HZ, both at dual channel, well OBS says stereo. Anyways the problem still persisted.

I then remembered I had a MPOW wireless headset with a mic, plugged that in, let it install drivers, sampling at 1 channel, 16 bit, 16k HZ, and it works fine with OBS with no mic cut off while Game Capture HD is running also........

This is strange............

My kind of cheap headset with mic works fine, but my Audio-Technica AT2020 mic that is plugged into a Steinberg UR22 mkII usb audio interface craps out?


The problem doesn't seem to be OBS and Elgato software per say, but Steinberg not liking having both of them running together........Or OBS not being able to sync them together? For a moment I thought it was CPU being overworked but my CPU usage is constantly around 6-9% usage, makes sense with HD60 Pro doing the capturing and the RX 570 GPU doing the encoding.

This is a freaking head scratcher.....

I forgot to add audio logs before, I apologize, these are a couple from this morning.

 

[Crossfader]

Issue solved.

I have been plugging the usb from the Steinberg onto a non powered usb 3.0 hub, then to one of the 2 usb 3.0 ports in front of the PC case.

Never thought it was a problem with how long the signal has to travel because the cable is about 4 feet long and the UBS hub is about another 6 feet. In the UR22 mkII, I have it powered from the wall and not using USB power from the PC, even have the mic boosted with the +48V option.

But then I decided to eliminate the USB hub and!!!! nothing...... still stuttering and cut off issues.

So I decided finally to eliminate the PC case USB and go straight to the USB ports on the back of the motherboard and it works!!!!! It's one of the 2.0 USB ports but I guess it works, flawlessly !!!

But because the cable is so short, my UR22 mkII is on the floor next to my feet, I need to get a longer cable but the problem is Yamaha/Steinberg decided to build it with a stupid USB type B port, they are so stupid....... Should I steal my printer cable? I think it is more than 7 feet long.

Anyways, if anyone is having issues with their mics, start by plugging it directly to the motherboard I guess!!

 

[konsolenritter]

So the issue seemed that your elgato and the steinberg both used possibly the same (internal) usb hub on the board. Thus concurrently fighting for the usb resources at the same time.

Now you possibly solved the issue not due to the cable length thing but changing one of the devices to use the other (another) port on the machine...

 

[Crossfader]

Yeah, I was pretty perplexed because the Elgato HD60 Pro is a card and so it uses a PCI lane, but it seems there was conflict between that and the USB hub from the PC case. A real head scratcher!!

Not sure if this matters, the motherboard is a Gigabyte B450 AORUS PRO Wifi, for the AM4 AMD chips, with a Ryzen 3600 3.6GHz CPU.