Multitrack Audio Recording Issue – Need Help Troubleshooting

[mikmakesbeats]

I am starting to use OBS to record audio/video for music production content. I use OBS to multitrack specific inputs from my UAD Apollo x8p interface but OBS ends up recording choppy audio. The audio looks like a random gate is applied and occurs about 50% of the time, especially in recordings over 30 minutes.

- Never happens on 4 multitrack set to a USB wireless mic, so it seems to be an OBS/interface issue.
- Issue isn't visible on OBS meters during recording but appears on playback of .mkv or remuxed .mp4 files.
- OBS, interface, and DAW are all set to the same sample rate (48k).
- Audio Encoder set to CoreAudio AAC and 320 bitrate for each multitrack.

I use the global Mic/Auxiliary Audio 1-3 to select specific interface inputs for multitrack. I know the ability to disable downmixing and select specific interface inputs is fairly new, maybe I’m dealing with a bug? Any suggestions for resolving this?

OBS 30.2 / MBP M1X / Ventura 13.6.7

 

[AaronD]

OBS is NOT the tool for audio! Use a DAW, or at the very least, Audacity. Do EVERYTHING in the DAW, including raw input, processing, headphones, everything, and only give OBS the final, finished soundtrack to pass through completely unchanged as its only audio source at all.

If you want to have multiple tracks in your video file, still do all of that in the DAW, and give each of them *separately*, as separate devices or loopbacks, to OBS to handle as "a straight dumb wire".

If you only want multitrack audio, with no video, don't use OBS at all. Export directly from the DAW to the file(s).

---

OBS is originally designed for a stereotypical bedroom streamer, who has a 5.1 game and a USB mic, and that's it. One-to-one correlation between sources and devices, and the 5.1 game needs to be downmixed to stereo to feed the stream. So that's what OBS does with multichannel interfaces, full stop.

Yes, it's annoying, and it's one of several persistent requests to fix, but OBS's audio is such a mess of band-aids and quick-expansions on the original good design, that the devs are looking instead to just rewrite that whole subsystem. When that finally comes out, I expect it to break everyone's rig with incompatibilities, and I don't expect anything to change until then.

 

[mikmakesbeats]

OBS is NOT the tool for audio! Use a DAW, or at the very least, Audacity. Do EVERYTHING in the DAW, including raw input, processing, headphones, everything, and only give OBS the final, finished soundtrack to pass through completely unchanged as its only audio source at all.

If you want to have multiple tracks in your video file, still do all of that in the DAW, and give each of them *separately*, as separate devices or loopbacks, to OBS to handle as "a straight dumb wire".

If you only want multitrack audio, with no video, don't use OBS at all. Export directly from the DAW to the file(s).

---

OBS is originally designed for a stereotypical bedroom streamer, who has a 5.1 game and a USB mic, and that's it. One-to-one correlation between sources and devices, and the 5.1 game needs to be downmixed to stereo to feed the stream. So that's what OBS does with multichannel interfaces, full stop.

Yes, it's annoying, and it's one of several persistent requests to fix, but OBS's audio is such a mess of band-aids and quick-expansions on the original good design, that the devs are looking instead to just rewrite that whole subsystem. When that finally comes out, I expect it to break everyone's rig with incompatibilities, and I don't expect anything to change until then.

Ah I see, thank you for the insight. Makes sense why the USB wireless mic multitrack turns out perfect everytime, because OBS is the only app recording it. I'll try just downmixing my interface's output. I'll report back if even just that gives me the same issue.

 

[mikmakesbeats]

OBS is NOT the tool for audio! Use a DAW, or at the very least, Audacity. Do EVERYTHING in the DAW, including raw input, processing, headphones, everything, and only give OBS the final, finished soundtrack to pass through completely unchanged as its only audio source at all.

If you want to have multiple tracks in your video file, still do all of that in the DAW, and give each of them *separately*, as separate devices or loopbacks, to OBS to handle as "a straight dumb wire".

If you only want multitrack audio, with no video, don't use OBS at all. Export directly from the DAW to the file(s).

---

OBS is originally designed for a stereotypical bedroom streamer, who has a 5.1 game and a USB mic, and that's it. One-to-one correlation between sources and devices, and the 5.1 game needs to be downmixed to stereo to feed the stream. So that's what OBS does with multichannel interfaces, full stop.

Yes, it's annoying, and it's one of several persistent requests to fix, but OBS's audio is such a mess of band-aids and quick-expansions on the original good design, that the devs are looking instead to just rewrite that whole subsystem. When that finally comes out, I expect it to break everyone's rig with incompatibilities, and I don't expect anything to change until then.

So I tried not using any multitracks, just recording the monitor outs of my interface but I still get the choppy audio issue sometimes.

Do you think the issue lies within the new OBS feature of selecting inputs from multichannel interface?

If so I’ll try the old way and just leave downmixing enabled and virtually route interface audio I want OBS to receive to Ch. 1/2 and see if it makes a difference.