A question to people who record their audio production/jams with OBS (I'm using windows if that's relevant):
Does OBS have a built-in limiter which can change how the sounds sound like when being produced, especially on headphones?
I've found that my strudel (or flok?) session sounds different (ie more muted) as soon as I hit record.
Even if you don't use flok or strudel, I am still interested in your OBS pecularities. Boosts are welcome.
Sep 19, 2026, 7:15 PM@fleuron i use loopback (paid product) to send audio to obs
i don't use a limiter but i turn the volume down in obs a bit to avoid peaking
@TodePond my problem is: obs seems to make the sounds less peaky to me, compared to other people's audio or relistening to the strudel patterns.
Sep 19, 2026, 7:18 PM@fleuron yeah i find obs audio is weird and buggy which is why i use loopback
Sep 19, 2026, 7:36 PM@fleuron so it sounds different when you press record, not just when you play back the recording? That's pretty strange.. If you have monitoring on I guess the sound might be doubling up but I wouldn't expect that to make it sound muted?
Sep 19, 2026, 7:38 PM@fleuron for me sound goes into OBS but doesn't come out again and so there's no change in audio quality.
@yaxu the sound at the time of the recording and the recording are consistent.
But they are not the same as playing the same pattern without having pressed record.
Indeed, the realest jams are never recorded.
Sep 19, 2026, 7:48 PM@fleuron weird I guess increasing the audio bitrate doesn't help?
Sep 19, 2026, 7:52 PM@fleuron i dont think there is a limiter unless you add one. but if your music is going over 0dB, it may get clipped depending on your output audio format. not sure why this would affect your monitoring during recording, but i guess it could happen if OBS triggers a switch from floating point to an integer sample format, or something like that
Sep 19, 2026, 7:54 PM@fleuron i have had my audio quality turn into potato just by running OBS (on Linux) if a bluetooth audio device was active at the same time. so weird things can definitely happen
Reichsempfänger audio quality with bluetooth headphones under Linux are often caused by a wrong default Bluetooth audio profile.
Many headsets come with microphones everybody instantly forgets, for good reason, and there are bidirectional audio profiles using a ridiculously bad encoding not intended for high fidelity playback.
Starting OBS may switch the audio profile from HiFi playback to Shoddy Garbage to include the headset's mic input.
This stuff is hilariously confusing to setup consistently, but it is possible! :)
Sep 20, 2026, 9:06 AM@fleuron another note: if i have my Bluetooth headphones on and then open obs, it usually tries to start using the headphones as a microphone so i go into my system settings and switch mic back to my laptop mic. kind of annoying.