Not sure if this is the right community to post this in, so please advise where, if not here. Been streaming our church service with great success for 22 weeks now since the beginning of lockdown in the UK and have been very much learning as we go. A recent issue since we moved to a bigger set up is the audio starts stuttering and breaking up during a live stream but can only be heard when watching the live stream. Listening through OBS doesn't indicate anything is up and it only ever affects sound. Closing and reopening OBS fixes it which isn't ideal during a live stream!

I'm not on the PC at the mo so I don't have a log to show you but I can point you to the exact moment it starts happening on the live stream from yesterday (here: 16:16). Up until this point it was just talking and a prerecorded video but when we go to the live music with two singers and a guitar it starts happening very quickly. This is the exact circumstance it happened in previously too. It's only happened twice but in 3 weeks that feels like a lot! Interestingly the sound is immediately fine when we cut back to our 'presenter' to explain we'll be rebooting OBS to resolve the issue (here: 18:29) and when we come back after the OBS reboot, the music, with exactly the same set up, is fine until the end without any problems (music after reboot begins here: 21:56).

I'm very new to this. I'm thinking it must be something to do with encoding and that when the sound gets full and complex OBS can't encode it fast enough? I haven't amended the audio encoding at all as I've never had any problems at all. I have video encoding bitrate set to 2000 and generally quite a conservative set up as I live in fear of dropped frames! The CPU never goes past 10% (we got a brand new gaming PC to deal with the streaming - it's all it does) and we never have any dropped frames or streaming issues otherwise.

1 Answer

You could compare your sample rates that are shown in OBS and in your Windows sound properties. In OBS go to Settings, then navigate to the Audio tab:

Next you can compare these settings with your Windows Audio Input settings by Pressing the WIN+R key combination to open the Run box, or open the Command Prompt. Type control mmsys.cpl sounds and press Enter. When the dialog box comes up, navigate to the Recording tab and right click on your sound input device and choose properties, then choose the Advanced tab:

Here you can try and choose another preset for the input device. You may need to try a few different combinations of the twp settings to get it right. You may also want to consider using MONO for the OBS sound input settings.

alternate solution

Another user mentioned this in his post about a similar issue:

If your audio just seems to stutter and no matter what you try you cannot sort it....[THE SOLUTION] in OBS your capture card source should be a video capture device. Click the settings cog in the mixer next to your video capture device and change [capture audio only] to [output to desktop audio] and then enable desktop audio. Make sure all your settings in obs match your capture card settings.

The user was referencing those who use avermedia capture cards, but this may work for you.Source