Question / Help OBS only records voice periodically: Blue Snowball ICE, PS4

[Sawfty]

My setup:

I've got my Elgato Game Capture HD plugged into my ps4 (with the audio workaround for headphones).
I can hear the game audio just fine on my headset and OBS records the game audio just fine.
I have a Blue Snowball ICE plugged into the usb port on the front of the ps4. It works perfectly for chatting with everyone in my party chat, ie. they can hear me and I can hear them via my headphones.

But when I record, the snowball doesn't always pick up my voice. Sometimes it cuts in and out, sometimes it doesn't record at all.

Any suggestions? The fact that it even records a little big of my voice tells me i'm on the right track with the hookup, but I must have done something wrong or missed something along the way? I'm not too sure.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[vencabot]

Recording is very system intensive and causes a lot of DPC latency and ISRs. For more information, I invite you to Google the terms, and I recommend that you install LatencyMon, as well, to test your system.

In short, although you may only be using a fraction of your CPU's total processing power, there are some CPU activities (like capturing real-time video and audio) which are much more timing-sensitive than other tasks.

If you're launching an application and your CPU's attention is briefly pulled away to do another activity, it's no big deal, because it can just quickly resume the task of launching the app and complete it as soon as possible.

On the other hand, if the CPU's attention is drawn away from an audio-recording process for too long (even a tiny fraction of a second), it'll drop the time-sensitive audio data that's being fed into the recording device. This will cause audio drop-outs, pops, crackles, etc.

This sort of latency issue is the bane of many streamers' existences, including mine. The issue is mostly out of your control (neither Windows nor OBS Studio make it easy to manually adjust audio buffer sizes, and the issue partially seems to be caused by Windows' handling of USB audio sources), but you can try to minimize the impact of DPC-latency-causing applications by diagnosing them with a tool like LatencyMon, and you can upgrade your streaming rig.

Good luck, sir.