Microphone Peaking/Static sound

[traz]

Whenever I speak I get weird peaks and glitches that are loud and unpleasant to listen to, meanwhile every other app recording my mic doesn't have this issue.

Recording on a SM7B, through XLR on a Focusrite Scarlett Solo

[Gractus]

Same issue here. Disabling automatic gain control didn't seem to fix it either.

[Gractus]

Turns out I disabled automatic gain control in the "Voice" tab of the settings. Once I disabled it in the actual "Game Recording" tab the static pops are resolved.

[traz]

Originally posted by Gractus:

Turns out I disabled automatic gain control in the "Voice" tab of the settings. Once I disabled it in the actual "Game Recording" tab the static pops are resolved.

Thanks, I'll try this out!

[Ember's embers]

I am having the same issue, turning off the gain control on both did not work for me

[Amphille]

Having the same issue on my end, my mic works fine on everything else

[traz]

Originally posted by Gractus:

Turns out I disabled automatic gain control in the "Voice" tab of the settings. Once I disabled it in the actual "Game Recording" tab the static pops are resolved.

That seems to work for me, sadly it also makes my microphone very very quiet..

[Gractus]

I would guess your mic levels are just low in general then. Depending on your setup you might be able to go and crank the microphone gain in the windows sound settings or your audio driver options.

As far as I could tell there isn't any kind of microphone gain control for steam recording at the moment.

Hopefully they just fix automatic gain control at some point. I'm sure they're working on that since everyone seems to be having the static popping issue.

[Ranthos]

Having this problem as well. It's pretty annoying.. i finally had something memorable to clip, but the clip's unwatchable because i laughed so hard it sounded like a gun firing with mic peaking lmao

[demo]

to anyone else having this problem, i turned off auto gain control on recording, turned on auto gain control on steam volume settings, and turned up the physical gain dial on my mic to about 45% and now it works perfectly

[Zairin]

Turning off, then back on the recording as a whole seemed to fix it for me. So it seems like settings get applied at the next time the recording is turned on.

My issue now, is that there isn't a way to change audio levels in the recording (dumb), but there's a way to change mic audio for regular voice and it doesn't apply to the recording. I've already got my own mic levels perfect for Discord, OBS, Windows settings, I would rather not have to tweak my settings in Windows, physically on my microphone, in Discord, In OBS, and everywhere else just because Steam didn't think to add a sound level bar.

[Bepis]

I was having this same issue. I played around with a bunch of settings, not sure which one fixed it. Here's a short list of things you could try and maybe one of them will work like it did for me:
In input properties lower your sound quality. I changed mine from 44000hz to 41000hz. This shouldn't result in much if any degradation in quality (They are both CD quality still) but 44Khz may just be too much information for steam recording to handle. idk.
Also try changing your input volume. Mine was around 50%, I lowered it to 40%, if it was actually peaking, this may have fixed it.

Next I messed around in the voice settings in steam. I enabled the voice test, and changed the settings until I got a sound I liked. The biggest setting I changed was I turned off voice transmission threshold and echo cancellation. These may have also been causing the problem. You could also try disabling noise cancellation but I was able to keep mine on and solve the problem. Hope this helps!

[GhostUrsa]

I'd like to chime in that this happens with the Steam Deck as well. You can't really adjust the hardware of the microphone much there to try and reduce anything. Turning off the auto-adjust feature in the settings removes the crackle, but then everything is quieter than the audio from the game you are recording. I even put the game audio at barely audible for my headphones (at around 5%) and it sounds the same.