Question / Help Corrupted recording: after ~30 mins the audio loops the same ~1sec

[janssico]

First time using OBS as a trial run for an upcoming multi-camera recording of our podcast:

Video continued recording just fine. Encoding settings were Simple, Software (X264), High Quality MKV with no custom settings and no Replay buffer. CPU never went over 40%. Audio set-up was two XLR mcis plugged into a Zoom U-44 USB interface. Our headphones were plugged into the Zoom as well.

Does anyone have any idea what could have happened?

 

[janssico]

Update: tentative diagnosis by a friend: "Sounds like the process that re-fills the audio buffer died, so it just keeps encoding the same snippet over and over."

And another friend, who'd offered to look at the original : "I just extracted the raw audio tracks and the repeat is baked into the file. The raw bytes go into a 17,833 sample repeat at that point. Since it's baked into the audio there's nothing there to rebuild."

It sucks to lose an episode but I'm more concerned about this issue reoccurring. We monitor the mics from the XLR-USB interface because the latency on the Mac is too high. If this happens again we won't know until after the recording's finished.

Is there anything I should have done differently?

 

[Narcogen]

12:10:25.258: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 64 milliseconds (source: Zoom)
12:10:25.258:
12:31:17.981: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 85 milliseconds (source: Zoom)
12:31:17.981:
12:52:31.171: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 106 milliseconds (source: Zoom)

Increasing latency is usually a symptom of system overload, possibly USB bus overload. 106ms isn't a lot but the fact that it increases during operation is.