I managed to repair my microphone, I reduced the number of audio tracks to 1 and I set the audio bit rate to 224. If your microphone ever works in other applications and for the monitoring but not for streaming and recording in OBS, try to do like me.
PS: For better audio quality, enable noise cancellation in RNNoise (better quality, more CPU usage) or Speex (low CPU usage, low quality) mode
Glad to hear you got it working. I'm not really sure why that worked though. It shouldn't have been the problem unless you misunderstood how the Tracks work.
If you're recording in Simple mode (Settings -> Output), then only the Track 1 checkbox matters. Others can be checked or not, with no effect.
If you're recording in Advanced mode, then you can have multiple Tracks in the same file, and the checkboxes that you show, determine which Track(s) each source ends up in. You can mix multiple things into the same Track, but the Tracks don't mix with each other. And you can put the same thing on multiple Tracks. In that grid of checkboxes, think of each horizontal row as a splitter, and each vertical column as a mixer.
For the noise reduction, yes, it works...for low-level constant sources. A computer fan that can be kept running at a constant speed, for example, regardless of temperature, but not a fridge that cycles on and off. It takes a few seconds for the noise suppressor to adapt to a new set of background noise, and until it does, you hear it.
If you have too much noise, even if it's constant, then it can't distinguish between that and your voice anymore. It might manage to be quiet when you're not talking, but your voice sounds bad too. The noise must still be kept to a minimum by other means, and then the suppressor can *finish* the job. It doesn't do the whole job; it only finishes.
It also doesn't like music. If you try to put music through it, it'll think you're in a lobby or something, with the ceiling speakers turned up too loud, and it'll try to remove all but the vocals. It usually ends up failing both goals, and sounds terrible!
(as far as it's concerned, music is a good example of "loud, variable noise")
And it tries to remove repetitive sound effects in a game too. A machine gun, for example, starts off sounding perfect, and then gets muffled as the noise suppressor decides that that's noise to be removed.
So be careful what you use it on. It's not an "automatic quality booster". Right tool, right job. Nothing is appropriate for everything.
