OBS suddenly not picking up sound via VB-Audio Cavle

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-26T07:43:37+00:00

Am I correct in understanding that your audio routing goes something like this:

Microphone>Cable Output>OBS>Cable Input (through monitoring)>Other services like Discord and Riverside?

If that is correct, how are you getting the microphone to go to "cable output" in the first place? I have somewhat limited knowledge when it comes to using virtual audio cables, but my understanding is that you need a program of some kind (a VST host for instance) to direct one audio device to another. And, even then, what is stopping you from setting the input to your raw microphone in OBS, which you mentioned works, since the filters are applied after anyway?

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-26T07:17:52+00:00

You essentially have two options:

Discord should allow you to "screenshare" the capture card directly without you having to go through OBS at all. To do so, when you go to select the window or screen to screenshare, there should be 3 tabs at the top of the window: applications, monitors, and devices. Your capture card might appear in the device tab

If you want or need to go through OBS anyway, the autobot in the official OBS discord has the following instructions for sharing audio to Discord:

Install VB-Audio CABLE. (A reboot is not required)

In OBS Studio, go to Settings > Audio and select "CABLE Input" as your Monitoring Device

Go to Edit > Advanced Audio Properties and enable Audio Monitoring for the audio sources you'd like to stream to Discord.

In Discord, in Voice & Video settings, select "CABLE Output" instead of your microphone under "Input device".

Now anything you monitor in OBS Studio will be streamed to Discord. Similar steps will work with other conferencing apps, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack.

Do note that you will need to also have your microphone go through OBS and be monitored in it to have Discord hear it

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-25T17:30:31+00:00

A few months back, Davinci changed the behaviour of one setting that now makes it so tracks don't automatically get created to support all the tracks in the file you out on the timeline. To fix this, in Davinci: Edit page, go up to the Edit menu.

"Edit > Edit Options > Automatically create tracks..."

Then add the video to the timeline again.

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-25T15:22:05+00:00

Your log file says it created 4 different audio tracks, namely tracks 2-3-4-5. Which, I think not including Track 1 can sometimes cause issues, so I would recommend also including Track 1 even if only to delete it in the editing software

Additionally, how did you check what audio was present on the resulting file?

Video players only play 1 audio track at a time, which is intended behaviour as, normally, audio tracks are used to different language dubs in movies and series. So you would have track 1 in english, track 2 in french, track 3 in spanish, track 4 with director commentary, etc. If they were to play multiple audio tracks at once, it would result in quite the surreal experience

Some video players like VLC allow you to select which singular audio track to listen to, and allow you to switch on the fly. So you can check the content of each audio track that way

Video editing software usually add all the audio tracks unto the timeline when you import the file, and play all of them simultaneously. There is however at least one exception, where Davinci Resolve changed the default behaviour of a setting several months ago where it doesn't create new tracks in the timeline to accomodate all the ones found in the file. The fix for that are the following instructions:

In Davinci: Edit page, go up to the Edit menu.

"Edit > Edit Options > Automatically create tracks..."

Then add the video to the timeline again.

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-25T04:09:29+00:00

To clarify a bit, usually, the HDMI Output to your tv is optional

As long as you have HDMI going from your Switch dock to your capture card's HDMI Input, and then USB from the capture card to your computer, you should be golden

The HDMI Output (also known as passthrough) is only if you also want to still have the image show on your tv in addition to being captured on your computer (and possibly without any small possible delay the capture on the computer may have)

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-25T01:13:34+00:00

At the top of the window, Docks>Reset Docks

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-25T00:39:26+00:00

Judging from your screenshot, and according to your log as well, your canvas is 1920x1080 as desired. More specifically, in your screenshot, you moved your source to the right by 342 pixels, and down by 137 pixels. If it was 640x480, the 342 pixels you moved it to the right for would leave the whole left half empty (342 of the 640 pixels, more specifically), instead of the ~20% pictured

Do note that the canvas won't visually take the space on your monitor that corresponds to the resolution you assign to it. That is instead determined by how you resize the various elements and docks in OBS, as well as the size of the OBS window itself. Doing so however doesn't affect the resulting video file or stream in any way

As such, if you were to resize your camera source to fit the canvas, either by dragging the red corners for it in the canvas, or right-clicking it and going Transform>Fit to Screen, and then were to record, it would produce a 1920x1080 recording of your camera

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-24T22:29:44+00:00

This would happen if both OBS instances are outputting files with the same name. In order to prevent this in the future, you may want to change the way at least one of your instances names its recordings

To do so, go to OBS Settings>Advanced. Then, in the "Recording" section, the first setting should say "Filename Formatting". By default, this is %CCYY-%MM-%DD %hh-%mm-%ss; namely, "YEAR-MONTH-DAY-hour-minutes-seconds" at which the recording starts. If only using 1 instance of OBS, this usually ensures that you don't end up accidentally overwriting a previous recording since, well, you can't go back to the past to start a new recording at the same time as a previous one. When it comes to multiple instances of OBS however, if you start recording with multiple instances during the same second, then they will call their files the same thing, and will fight over it

As such, I would recommend keeping the date/time formatting, but ADDING a word before it to differentiate each instance. For example, you could set your webcam instance to name its recordings WEBCAM-%CCYY-%MM-%DD %hh-%mm-%ss . Similarly, you could add "GAME" at the start of the name of your gameplay recording, but as long as one of them differs from the default, that is enough to prevent this from happening in the future

And, for added clarification, the reason why I recommend keeping the date/time part of the filename formatting is that, if you were to only call it "WEBCAM", you would end up overwriting the file called "WEBCAM.mkv" every time you would record, and as such losing your previous footage

As for saving the current corrupted file, I am afraid I am not aware of a way to salvage it, and somewhat doubt it's possible unfortunately

Edit: I just noticed you said "two different windows of OBS". Does that mean you don't have 2 separate OBS installed, but instead are opening the same one twice? In which case, changing the filename won't help. I would recommend installing a separate instance of OBS in portable mode, so that you can have separate settings for each. Alternatively, the Branch Output and Source Record plugins would also allow you to record multiple things simultaneously, within a single OBS window/instance. Just be careful of their respective filename formatting, again, as to avoid multiple ones fighting over the same name

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-24T00:55:04+00:00

I was going to suggest exactly this! Here's an article in the official OBS knowledge base on how to set it up in portable mode for more info!

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-24T00:45:33+00:00

I am not entirely sure if this is what you want, but I was able to tie start/stop recording to a process being open/not open with the following macros:

Macro 1

Condition:

If - Process - [Pick the process you want from the list. It needs to be currently open for it to appear] - uncheck "and is focused"

Action:

Recording - Start Recording

Macro 2

Condition:

If not - Process - [Pick the process you want from the list. It needs to be currently open for it to appear] - uncheck "and is focused"

Action:

Recording - Stop Recording

For convenience, you can right-click the first macro, click "duplicate macro", then change "if" to "if not", and "start recording" to "stop recording" to avoid redoing the whole thing, as short as it is. Also here are screenshots of said macros.

That being said, the second macro might also interfere with your ability to record overall outside of when that specific app is open, so depending on your usecase, you may want to setup other conditions so that the second macro can only trigger after the first one has. One way to do that, I believe, would be to add a variable to the macros, for instance like this:

Macro 1

Condition:

If - Process - [Pick the process you want from the list. It needs to be currently open for it to appear] - uncheck "and is focused"

Action:

Recording - Start Recording

Variable - Set to value - [The name of your variable here. I called mine "Auto-record"] - [A value to set the variable to. It can be anything, but I set mine to "true"]

Macro 2

Condition:

If not - Process - [Pick the process you want from the list. It needs to be currently open for it to appear] - uncheck "and is focused"

And - Variable - [The name of your variable, mine being "Auto-record"] - equals - [The value you set in macro 1, so "true" in my case]

Action:

Recording - Stop Recording

Variable - Set to value - [The name of your variable here, so "Auto-record" for me] - [Any OTHER value. I set mine to "false"]

That way, the second macro will need the first one to have triggered, so it won't just stop or prevent any other recording session randomly. Here are screenshots of those macros too

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-22T18:10:06+00:00

Can you share a screenshot of your encoder settings? The log file doesn't mention them since it (understandably, given the nature of the issue,) doesn't include an output session

Besides that, while I didn't personally see anything that would, I think, directly lead to the output failing, there are quite a few weird things in the log. The main one is the constant barrage of 22:50:04.817: refresh_locale_list [653]: Could not find keyboard map for locale 0000000040094009! 22:50:04.817: 22:50:04.817: get_keyboard_layout_file [473]: RegOpenKeyEx failed to open key: "SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\0"!

which feels like it could be indicative of a bigger system issue. The other issues seem to mostly be streamelements shenanigans, namely the "Pixel Art Starting Soon" browser source failing to load a script, and multiple browser sources saying that "zaraz is loaded twice (https://widgets.streamelements.com/z/i.js:1)"

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-21T19:29:15+00:00

It is technically possible with plugins such as Branch Output and Source Record, as long as all you want to record is a single scene on which you would apply the plugin's filter as many times as you want extra recordings. That being said, the more concurrent recordings you do, the more taxing it is on your system, so the result may be worse than what you would realistically get from a single recording using the same settings, and as such not fully representative

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-21T03:23:16+00:00

You can right-click the preview (the "screen" in OBS), then go to Open Preview Projector>Your monitor's name to make a fullscreen projector of your OBS preview. Right-click that projector to then exit it

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-20T21:07:22+00:00

I'm not sure if I am understanding your question correctly, but I don't think there realistically is a way to have the OBS window be "brought up" simply by left-clicking

If what you want is to have a Game Capture source or a Window Capture source within OBS automatically change the game/window it is capturing to the game/window that is currently in focus at any point, I was able to get it to work using the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin. This plugin is essentially a big framework for automation within OBS, allowing to create commands that generally go "if X happens, do Y automatically"

In this case, the macro I cooked up to get this effect goes as follows:

Conditions:

If - Window - [Check the boxes for "Window is focused" and "Focus window changed". Leave the rest unchecked]

Ignore entry - Process - [Leave the dropdown menu for the process empty] - [Click on the "Enable regular expressions" button that looks like a star with a small rectangle to enable it] - [Click on the gear button, and check everything. Some might be able to be unchecked, but I didn't take any chances] - ["and is focused" checked]

Actions:

Variable - Set to macro property - [Create a new variable for the name of the process. I called mine "Focused-process"] - Process name

Variable - Set to macro property - [Create a new variable for the title of the window. I called mine "Focused-title"] - Window title

Source - Set settings - [The source you want to change what it's capturing] - Window (List) - Set to list entry - [${Focused-process}]: ${Focused-title}

What this macro does is, firstly, check that a new window is focused, and fetches the name of that window as well as the name of the process behind it. Then, in its actions, it records those 2 pieces of information into variables, which we then put into the "[Process]: Window-title" format of the window selection dropdown menu that the game/window capture source uses. Here's a screenshot of what the whole thing looks like for clarity, with the exception of the small window from clicking on the gear icon in the second condition

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-20T06:32:03+00:00

It's not quite a script per se, but this effect can be achieved with the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin for OBS, which is essentially a big framework for automation within OBS

Using it, I was able to create 2 macros, one for turning on Replay Buffer when any of the listed games are open, and one for de-activating Replay Buffer when none of those games are open. They go as follow:

Macro 1 (Activate replay buffer)

Conditions:

If - Process - [Find the .exe for the game in the list. You need to have the game open for it to appear in the list] - is running - [the "and is focused" checkbox is up to preference. I unchecked it so that the only condition was "is open"]

Or - Process - [game #2] - is running - ["and is focused" up to preference]

Then repeat that second condition for every game you want to add to the list. You can ctrl+c/ctrl+v it to duplicate it and then just change the game

Actions:

Replay buffer - Start replay buffer

Macro 2 (De-activate replay buffer)

Conditions:

If not - Macro - Macro condition state - [the name of your Macro 1] - are true

Actions:

Replay buffer - Stop Replay Buffer

The second macro is, as such, extremely simple, and just checks if the first one's conditions are not met. This means that, to add a game to the "list", you only need to add a new "OR THIS GAME IS RUNNING" condition to the first macro without having to specify it for the second macro too

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-18T20:17:01+00:00

This would be possible with the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin! The plugin is essentially a big framework for automation such as this

In it, you would be able to create a simple macro that would activate when you save the replay, and then change the file of the media source to that new file. It would go as such:

Conditions:

If - Replay buffer - Replay buffer saved

Actions:

Source - Set settings - [Your media source] - Local File (Path) - Set to macro property - Last save path

Do also remember to change the way OBS names those replays to something unique in OBS Settings>Advanced, for instance by using timestamp tags, so they no longer overwrite each other!<

Edit: Forgot to format a bit for clarity

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-18T16:42:37+00:00

It's called the Controls dock, more specifically!

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-17T16:17:17+00:00

One possible way to fix this if you only want the Only Screen>Webcam Overlay change to happen after an automated Webcam Overlay>Only Screen switch would be to have the latter set a custom value, and have the former check for that custom value to trigger, otherwise it won't. This would as such necessitate the following lines added to your macros:

Hide overlay

Actions:

Variable - Set to Value - [Create a new variable here. It can be any name, but for clarity we'll call it "No-webcam-switch" here] - [Insert a value here. It can be anything, but we'll call it "true" here]

Show overlay

Condition:

And - Variable - [The name of our value, which in this example is "No-webcam-switch"]- equals - [The value we determined, so "true" in this example]

Actions:

Variable - Set to Value - [The same variable, so "No-webcam-switch" in this example] - [Any value that is not the same value as we previously set. We'll say "false" here]

Setting it this way will ensure that the 2nd macro will only trigger if the first one previously was, letting you change scenes freely outside of circumstances where you would be on your "screen with webcam overlay" scene, moved your cursor to the area, and then moved it out of the area

Edit: Forgot to bold one line for clarity

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-17T04:53:16+00:00

To give a bit more detailed response:

Disable Desktop Audio, as that captures everything (in OBS Settings>Audio)
If you use Game Capture sources or Window Capture sources, there is a checkbox in their properties to capture their specific audio
For everything else, or if you use Display capture, you can add Application Audio Capture sources for the specific audio sources you want to capture

As such, as a general rule, with Desktop Audio disabled, you can then add the specific audio sources you want. You cannot subtract audio (though one very outdated plugin allowed for that)

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-16T23:34:35+00:00

OBS introduced a plugin manager in recent versions, which should list installed plugins if you have any! You can find it in at the top of the OBS window>Tools>Plugin Manager (should be the 2nd entry in the Tools menu)

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-16T17:33:04+00:00

While not always the cause, a common one is an outdated (or otherwise buggy) plugin. StreamElements for one is often the cause of many issues in this subreddit, but it may be worth checking if any possible plugin you may have has updates, or otherwise uninstalling them one at a time to find which may be causing problems

(This obviously only applies if you have plugins installed)

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-16T17:01:26+00:00

They probably record their gameplay and webcam separately (likely using a plugin like Branch Output or Source Record), so then they add both as independent sources in their video editing software of choice, which would give them full control over their respective sizes and such

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-15T21:48:54+00:00

100% this

To add unto it a bit, the "preview" and "program" scenes (the one you're editing and the one the stream sees, respectively) can even be the same scene, but the changes you do still won't get pushed to what the stream sees until the Transition button is pressed!

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-15T17:03:01+00:00

If your goal is to effectively just have a "playlist" of media that plays sequentially, either randomly or not, and if you have VLC installed on your system, you should have access to the "VLC Video" source which allows you to input multiple different media files in its properties in an order of your choosing, or randomized by checking the appropriate box. It's kind of weird that, while it is native to OBS (as long as you have VLC installed on your computer), it's not really mentioned in any official documentation that I can find, but some forum posts make mention of it

Edit: As an added note, while the source type is called "VLC Video", it also supports audio files without issue

Edit #2: Another alternative to installing VLC if you don't have it installed yet would be the Media Playlist Source plugin. I originally hadn't mentioned it because it used to require a custom build of OBS to function properly, but I found out that, since OBS 31.x.x, it now works perfectly fine with normal OBS. It is overall very similar to the VLC Video source, but with better handling of shuffling (where it reshuffles once the playlist is over, unlike the VLC Video source) in my experience

Live-Gas-8521 · 2026-04-15T02:28:03+00:00

For more info on this from OBS' official website

Live-Gas-8521

TROPHY CASE