Urgent Help Needed Before Wedding - Audio Stuttering in Recording and Stream

[areinhiller]

Hello all. I am in need of urgent help. I'm the multimedia coordinator of a church. We have a wedding at the end of the month that needs to be live-streamed, but OBS has suddenly started stuttering its audio in both recording and streaming. It worked fine for the funeral we streamed on the 8th, but for the funeral on the 10th and both services today, we had helicopter audio. The audio coming from the soundboard is fine when sampled from the board itself. OBS's audio levels show the stutter. I've searched the forums and have tried a number of different solutions, but none have worked.
I've tried:

• Disabling Realtek audio devices leaving only our Blackmagic devices active
• Lowering Mic and Speaker levels to between 80 and 90
• Running the Auto setup Wizard
• Restarting OBS
• Restarting the Computer
• Making sure all audio devices are set to 48kHz
• Adjusting streaming bit rate up to 3500Kbps
• Checking all 6 audio track boxes under the recording tab of Output
• Using Simple output

We are using OBS 26.1.1 64-bit windows. Quicktime for Windows is installed on the computer even though the logs show the CoreAudio AAC encoder as uninstalled or not located. We stream through sermonstudio.net. I've included the log and screenshots of all our settings and devices. Any suggestions on how to solve this or is this an issue with the current version of OBS? Thank you in advance!

 

[areinhiller]

(TL;DR at the bottom)

Ok, if anyone is looking at this with a similar issue and wants to save themselves 20 hours of pure troubleshooting, I tried more things and eventually found a solution. In addition to everything listed in my first post, I tried:

• Setting the computer to game mode with high-performance battery options
• Cleaned out the computer memory and storage
• Triple checked sample rates
• In the recording tab, only checked audio track 1
• Unticked camera as "set capture audio device"
• Verified that HDR was turned off in computer settings
• Marked OBS as an exception in Windows security
• Cleared all computer registry errors
• Uninstalled Malware Bytes and CCleaner
• Changed encoder to hardware rather than software
• Uninstalled Quicktime
• Rebuilt all scenes
• Built new profiles
• Added a separate audio capture device into the scene
• Triple checked all audio devices
• Changed out every cable known to man
• Reinstalled the latest Windows 10 update
• Uninstalled and reinstalled OBS
• Reinstated various versions of OBS going all the way back to version 20
• Uninstalled and reinstalled Black Magic's Software
• Reinstated various versions of Black Magic's Software going back to 2015's version
• Tried every combination for syncing the Black Magic capture card setting with OBS
• Tried more combinations of OBS versions and Black Magic versions than a high school math word problem
• Threatened the equipment with a "Hard Reset" via sledgehammer
• Rinse and repeat everything but on a brand new Macbook Pro instead of a PC

None of these solutions worked and by the end, I had lost all the video signal as well. Twice somewhere in the middle of these various PC attempts, the computer declared that the keyboard and mouse were malfunctioning and the only way to get them to work was to hard power down the computer. I put out a call to the Discord channel that, much like this post, no one responded to. So I was left to continue my digging. This led me to discover that Black Magic and OBS essentially hate each other right now and our capture card was obsolete. We bought an Elgato HD60 S+ capture card to replace our Intensity Shuttle and all our problems when away. Based on several posts, I kept our OBS on 26.0.2 for safety reasons, but the Elgato is working like a dream. It also fixed our problem of having to hit "defaults" in our video capture anywhere from 5-25 times to get the video signal to work. Now everything comes up without prompting and all test streams have been running smoothly.

TL;DR - Our issue was solved by replacing our BlackMagicDesign Intensity Shuttle with an Elgato HD60 S+ and reinstating OBS version 26.0.2

Best of luck to all of you experiencing tech issues!

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Glad you were able to fix your issue. I just streamed a funeral last weekend, and audio issues as you described would have been a nightmare. Instead during the Sunday service, the Panasonic Virtual USB driver for our NDI PTZ camera crashed and would not simply restart (had to use RunAS with admin account to kill a background process (which I wasn't aware of previously, found as part of real-time troubleshooting while keeping livestream up with Audio and Service Bulleting slides), then restart VirtualUSB driver, then deactivate/re-activate camera in OBS, all while service continuing... just a little stressfull for a couple of minutes
- so tech support call to Panasonic in order

I've found that I check messages on this board/forum during the week, which means sometimes messages over the weekend get buried

I did NOT look at your logs, but for anyone else who reads this post before posting (and good for those who do their homework, arinheller clearly did)... what was missing from the original post was a description of the physical layout / audio path. Black Magic was briefly mentioned but not which model, nor which functionality in use

So for others troubleshooting that come across this thread
My generic recommendations when it comes to audio and video, will usually start with: how is the behavior OUTSIDE of OBS? Once confirmed that the signal is getting to the OBS computer ok, then one dives into OBS and its interactions with local hardware and software interfaces.

Another significant issue (I won't bother to repeat how often I see it) is folks mentioning they didn't change anything but something happened . 99% of the time - obvious things did change. For ex Microsoft Updates, and unlike in decades past, M$ is changing functionality on a regular basis (desktop as a service) and as user you can't rely on the month patches ONLY being fixes. And so much is 'an issue', that sometimes proper fixes break prior work-arounds, and 3rd parties (and even MS itself has to scramble to fix their stuff when the OS changes)... And then there are 3rd party plug-ins and other elements (streamelements and other browser based plugins often being atrocious) ..... a LOT of moving parts, and not always obvious where an interaction breaks down (and this isn't an OBS issue, true for other complex s/w and all other streaming s/w).

Windows 10 has some new paradigms for audio and video that are works in progress, so that can create frustration.
In the above scenario, Black Magic wrote drivers with one set of assumptions (Windows and OBS/other receivers), and those assumptions were no longer valid. That happens and is an end-user responsibility to stay on top of, and is an unfortunate fact of life. Walled garden environments only partially address this. In a non-walled garden environment (Windows and Linux), an end-user needs to track compatibility across the components (and I grant, that isn't always to do)

 

[areinhiller]

I'm sorry to hear about your issues Lawrence. Trying to troubleshoot mid-service is always stressful! I hope the call to Panasonic proves fruitful.

For those reading this thread, I also want to tack on that if you are in a scenario where you are working with a setup someone else put together, ask the person who rigged it to walk you through it. If you are like me and the person isn't around anymore, Google is your best friend for hunting down what equipment is there/what it does, and in the case of our Intensity Shuttle, Google Images can help deduce exactly what it is when the identifying sticker is half missing. Something I'll be working on, and suggest to those who have multiple people working with their set up, is creating a wiring diagram so no one has to try to guess/remember what is going where and for how many Skittles. It also provides a nice quick visual reference for troubleshooting.