Trying to fully ditch Windows for streaming. So close, but this audio issue is breaking me.
Okay, I’ve been grinding through the process of replacing Windows 10 in my Twitch streaming setup with Pop!_OS. I’ve got OBS dialed in, my old NVIDIA card is holding it together surprisingly well, and video performance is right where I need it.
But the audio. Is. Destroying. Me.
It’s this horrible crunchy, crushed mess when I stream from Linux. Same exact hardware, same OBS scene setup. On Windows 10 it’s crystal clear. I’m pulling audio from my mixer and theres no “Line In” I can see. Something in the Linux chain is mangling it.
Here’s a side-by-side if you want to hear the pain:
Pop!_OS (crushed audio): https://youtu.be/wQUVlufAQs8?si=RlGH8Z90dK0X9KhA
Windows 10 (clean audio): https://youtu.be/hbJzIHzg_ek?si=ThiZpbBgTk89qL2p
Sample rates seem to match, nothing obvious is clipping. I’m out of ideas and running on pure stubbornness at this point.
Would love to hear from anyone who’s made Linux work in a similar setup. Tips, gotchas, weird fixes. Whatever you've got. I'm so close to fully escaping Windows here. Grrr.
For reference, here’s how I got my Pop!_OS setup working so far (OBS + NVIDIA NVENC + GTX 960):
https://doubledropdown.com/abdoanmes/2025/ditching-windows-setting-up-obs-with-nvidia-nvenc-on-linux-pop_os-gtx-960/
Some initial thoughts (I don't use PopOS, so fair warning)
I believe PopOS uses pipewire by default now.
I'm not super familiar with pipewire but you can change the sample rate there too:
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-rate 48000https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=25768
I really appreciate the tips and I'm definitely not taking any of this for granted.
I am on PipeWire (confirmed it’s running), but now I’m wondering if there’s some weird Ubuntu/Pop!_OS quirk happening behind the scenes. I'm gonna experiment with forcing 48000Hz across the board and see if that helps. Buffer tweaking is next on the list too.
Also good to hear the Steam Deck has similar quirks, it makes me feel a little less crazy. Thanks again for the additional insights.
Off topic, who knows. But what I’ve noticed on my steam deck is that if I have headphones connected before waking directly into a game, I get issues. If I wake and then plug in headphones, all good.
Thank you.
I thought the audio crackle in Pop_OS while running Phoenix Wright was due to it only hitting mid-50s FPS... Now I'm wondering if it's the same problem you're having.
In my case I'm running audio into my computer through a "line in" and sending out through Twitch. Locally through the mixer it sounds great but the processing the computer does to the analog signal makes it sounds terrible.
I've got nothing really, except the obvious: Have you tried turning down the gain? It's compressed, but not so much as I would think there's a problem, it's just that the dial goes to 11 and you happen to have it set to 11.
Appreciate you chiming in. Yeah, I double-checked the gain and it’s not cranked on the mixer and in OBS I have it adjusted down. What’s weird is that the exact same hardware chain sounds totally fine on the Windows box, but something in the Linux pipeline is crushing it. Still digging through levels, sample rates, and possible resampling weirdness.
Have you checked the gain in the OS settings too? Ubuntu's default at max volume destroys my mic quality in the same way and makes it incredibly loud, setting it to like 40% in system settings makes it sound like it did on Windows with gain maxed out.
Good thought and I did adjust that gain as well. It kinda helps but still has crunch. I was hoping I could further set my input to "Line In" instead on "Mic in". I suspect that has something to do with how the signal comes through.
The one thing I can think of is trying to run another distribution on a flash drive and set up there to get a basis of comparison? If you could narrow it down to either the audio setup for the distro or the hardware driver itself, it may give you an idea of how to proceed?
This is a decent idea, and I'd suggest Ubuntu Studio as a possible guinea pig. In theory Studio is focused on audio/video work and may have some tweaks in the default audio stack that might work better than whatever Pop is doing.
I would vote for fedora and or opensuse. Fedora has that fedora studio or something too and between red hat and canonical (hate them both(exaggerating)) I trust more on red hat in having a working system
Thanks for the idea. It spent about 15 hours learning how to get everything setup on this build (#LinuxNoob) and getting OBS tuned in was chore. It really seems to be how the audio is processed
That blog post makes it sound like the nvidia 960 gtx won't work in windows 11, which isn't true. I don't know if you're switching to avoid a hardware upgrade, but win11 apparently requires WDDM 2.0 which is associated with the direct3d feature level 11_1 onward, according to the chart on this wikipedia page: Feature levels in Direct3D. The 960 gtx is from the maxwell generation, and they all support feature set 12_1, so they're in the clear.
I'd recommend keeping the linux machine around as a side project and continuing to use windows until your audio issues clear up. You can bypass the TPM 2.0 check in windows 11 if you create the install media using rufus, and if you still want to avoid win11 altogether, you can install windows 10 iot ltsc and keep getting updates until 2032.
edit: Sorry, I know these kind of answers are annoying. But I've built a lot of linux machines over the years, and problems like the one you're describing will drive you completely insane. Better to take your time with it if you can.
No worries at all. Honestly, I really appreciate this kind of reply. It’s clear you’ve been down this road before, and that insight is super helpful. You're totally right about the GTX 960 and feature level support. I’ll tweak that part in the blog post to make sure it’s clearer I was referring more to the Windows 11 upgrade push in general, not specific hardware limitations.
I’m definitely not against keeping Windows in the mix longer term, especially with tricks like bypassing TPM or using LTSC (hadn’t thought about that option, I'll have to do more research on that). It’s just been a bit of a stubborn quest for me to see how far I can take Linux as my main machine for streaming.
Really appreciate the nudge to take a breath and not burn out chasing the audio issues and I am gonna try that “side project” approach and keep hacking at it on the weekends. Thanks again for the thoughtful reply.
I have a very similar setup to you. I've ran Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS with Wayland and an NVIDIA GPU for over a year at this point.
Specs: RTX 3080 Ti, Ryzen 5 5600x, 64GB RAM
You haven't mentioned what audio interface you use for your mic (I have the Scarlett Solo 3rd Gen), but it sounds like it's OBS that's the issue? The intro music is also blown out. I don't stream, but I do record local gameplay clips and don't have the audio problems you describe. I realized I had an old version of OBS installed, so I just updated it to use the flatpak version 31.0.3, and it works totally fine. I ran
flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio, thenflatpak run com.obsproject.Studioto open it. You can use FlatSeal to give OBS permission to your GPU if necessary.I'd start with the basics. There's a lot of useful information in this help article. Personally, I've had to run the command to fix the crackling issue.
Make sure you're using Pipewire - you can do so by running the command
pactl info | grep "Server Name". You should see:Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 1.0.3). You can then usepavucontrolto set various audio levels. They are able to go past 100%, so I'd make sure it's not that.It'd also be a good idea to check the Audio Mixer section in OBS. My desktop audio and mic don't go past the yellow zone (about -13db). If it's going into the red, you can either turn it down in OBS or use the
pavucontrolprogram to lower it.My final suggestion without more info is to look into Easy Effects. It's a bit confusing to setup at first, but it lets me do things like boost my mic volume without adjusting my gain, or add a gate to prevent my keyboard from getting picked up. I don't think this should be the first choice to fix something like this, but perhaps it can help.
Edit: I gave this some more thought and I think a better troubleshooting step would be to try recording test audio in Audacity. At the very least, this would point you in the direction of OS settings vs OBS settings.
Thank you for the insightful post and ideas. I have been adjusting OBS and even with adjusting rhe sliders for the audio to go lower so the audio doesn't peak, it still sounds bad. It's almost like the audio "Line In" is being distorted by something. I switched back the Windows setup and the OBS settings are exactly the same and the issue is gone. I'm going to continue messing around with this and try some of the steps you mentioned. Thank you
I've also ran into issues with audio being worse on linux than the exact same setup on windows, but unfortunately I was never able to find the underlying cause. I found some limited success through the use of software like EasyEffects to minimise the problem, but obviously that's not a great "solution"
Thank you.
So my partner has been helping me get a handle on Linux Mint lately, and has been walking me through finding fixes and doing various things. I do my therapy sessions virtually, and the sound was fucking worthless, so we sat down to futz around with it....
In very short order he fully took over, because the problem was so deeply layered and esoteric that he (a lifelong Linux user) was struggling to make heads or tails of it, never mind trying to explain it to my noob ass. From what I could gather after the fact, it's a result of decades worth of patches and weird edge-case audiophile silliness that, due to the nature of Linux and those who use it, never found any kind of consistent or coherent consensus.
Literally the only thing that worked (if I understand it correctly) was installing Audacity and using it as a middleman processor kinda thing before outputting to the video call... There's another mic software being used in tangent here, not sure if it's Audacity's mic or yet another program, but it's one that cancels out the background noises that the standard Mint mic picks up, and it's just this whole janky, cobbled together monstrosity. And there's a narrow sweet spot with all the volumes of the various in- and out-puts in which it sounds good (not amazing, but fine) and if you go outside of that it gets crunchy and terrible again. So. Lol.
Idk if any of that helps, but the struggle is real and you're not alone in it! If you like I can ask my partner for more details/specifics, but otherwise I'll be here lurking, hoping someone else comes in with a better fix.
Thank you for the write up.a d that sounds like a nightmare when it comes to consistency. I have an over engineered setup with mixers and cameras. It sounds like the setup you have kinda works and the intermediary may be a fix. Sad because that's a bummer it's so complex.
Is your CPU governor set to Performance? Often it gets set to Balanced by default configuration which causes a ton of performance issues.
I created a startup process to set it to performance each reboot and that helped with some latency issues but the audio stayed the same. On Windows I could select "line in" when I plugged in a device whereas Linux only sees it as mic in.
Off-topic: It seems insane that you need to have a systemd service to persist power settings instead of a default setting somewhere in the system76 program's configuration.
Yeah. I thought so too. I only noticed it after latency kept coming back and it default to balanced after reboot. I was like wth!?
did you do ‘optimize just for recordings’ in the wizard?
also, in your system, turn all of the input down low, start recording, then move up a little to find a sweet spot. goofy stuff.
I had set for streaming. I'll have to play with the levels again. It seems a bit silly though because it wasn't this bad on Windows that it would take this much futzing to get right.
I havent done a lot with OBS, but I remember there being some goofy stuff wrt delaying audio to match the video and stuff. Definitely try those levels way down low, though.
This kind of thing is my favorite to fix :)
No sure if it's actually your favorite or you are inferring it's a pain in the butt. Lol. I don't like it much because I feel.like a fish out of water with Linux. I really want to ditch Windows, but Linux feels fragile when it comes to some of the nuanced needs I'm looking for here.
There's always weird issues with Linux that don't always feel completely solvable, which has been my experience every time I've used it for awhile.
Currently using Linux Mint on my machine and there's lots of little issues I'm trying to deal with, but the current one for me is fans. In Windows, fans spin up fine and push plenty of air, but in Linux when playing certain games, they seem to like to be slow, causing my laptop to get pretty hot and throttle.
I'm sticking with it for now, trying to sort things out, but I can often find myself ready to give up when I'm tired and I just want to do what I want to do, rather than troubleshoot issues. I'm trying to move away from Windows as well, but I've been questioning how worth it it is to me when it's late, I'm tired and I want to use my little bit of time to play a game instead.
Sorry, I know this comes off as a downer post! I really want to switch over, I just get discouraged!
everything has a solution --- so I love getting into a problem that seems impossible. When it eventually works, its so nice.
For instance, on my Windows box, one of the updates borked bluetooth. It would list devices and try to pair but couldn't ever successfully do it. Turns out the update changed the user the Bluetooth services were running under. Once I fixed that, everything worked fine.
Meanwhile, over the course of my year without bluetooth I tried multiple cards, operating systems, etc to narrow it down, which I did. So when it worked again, I was so happy for about five minutes, then life goes on.
Linux can have a lot of little quirks and I think people who have used Linux full-time for a long time are either blind to them or forget about them. Hell, even moving to Firefox -- so many little things that are annoying. :)
Um... maybe I'm doing something wrong here, but I don't hear a difference between the two YT videos you provided, especially in the speaking parts. I've tried to jump around to different timestamps, and still can't hear any damage, crushing, clipping, etc.
Could you provide another pair of things to compare? I want to try to help.
It actually makes me wonder if everything is fine with the recording and streaming, but it's your particular listening setup which is making it sound worse [just for you only]?
I only recorded one show through the Linux setup. That was episode 78 Turn your audio up a bit and play the intro countdown. Then quickly go to an older episode and listen to the countdown. You should be able to hear how ep 78 sounds blown out.
Any of the prior episodes were on the Windows and sound fine. Thank you!
Okay, I listened to the opening music for E78, E77, and E76. I had to put on my headphones to begin noticing the difference. Honestly, I think it's a fairly subtle delta, I think because the choice of instruments lends itself to seeming like the clipping is done on purpose.
If you've certainly looked at your meters, and nothing is hitting the ceiling (reds) or showing obvious clipping there; and you've already tried simply turning down the level of the music track, then my next thoughts are:
I would check all the plugins and effects on the Windows side. I suspect there might be a limiter or compressor active on the music audio source in OBS (or perhaps even before the signal reaches OBS) which may be absent when you try to build the same setup and signal flow in Linux. For example, if you use VLC to play the track, I know VLC lets you set the volume above 100%. I know that when I've done that in the past, audio which is already nearing clipping will clip when the volume is pushed to like 120% or 140% in VLC.
How are you playing the music track in Windows, and how in Linux? Are you able to share the track itself, so we can have a better reference point for how it's supposed to sound without the problems?
I also wonder if the issue is specific to streaming with OBS, and, for example, playing the track alone without streaming produces no problems with the sound of it.
Another thought: Check your CPU usage during streaming, and compare Windows to Linux. It could be that Windows is somehow more efficient with your hardware, while Linux has all your cores pegged. If the system is being asked to do too much work, perhaps the plugins which would normally do their job under a managable CPU load instead cause artifacts, dropped frames, etc. when the CPU(s) can't handle things.