Tiny "micro glitches" in audio recorded directly within Shotcut

  • What is your operating system?

Windows 11

  • What is your Shotcut version (see Help > About Shotcut)?

25.05.11

  • Can you repeat the problem? If so, what are the steps?

Yes

Record a voiceover using my wireless headset, directly within Shotcut.
Audio has little micro stutters and pops randomly. Very small, but definitely noticeable. They are not being produced in realtime, they are embedded in the recording because they are there even if I play it back in VLC. I can record with the same headset using Audacity instead, and it’s perfect.

Is here any way to record quality audio natively within Shotcut? It’s much less convenient to have to record in Audacity, Export, then import to Shotcut, and edit. But at the moment I fear I will have no choice but to completely re-do my VO recording and editing. I had thought the noises were just from realtime playback, but they are in any exports as well.

Shotcut just runs ffmpeg in the background to record the audio. You can see the command line it runs when you View > Application Log. Something like
ffmpeg -f dshow -i audio=___ -flush_packets 1 -y voiceover.opus
And it tells the operating system to give the child process a high priority.
Maybe it does not work good with your wireless headset. Maybe it will get better in a future version of ffmpeg will improve it when we upgrade it.

All I know for sure is that Audacity is perfect. I ended up re-recording the whole VO there, and importing and re-editing it. The end result is so much better I can’t really complain about the extra work involved. Now I know… always record VO externally and import it for editing.

This is what I do, especially when I need to mix audio.

Did you experience the same problem with Shotcut Record Audio in Windows? Last time I used it (May) it worked OK for me. It will be good if someone who has the problem can see if the ffmpeg command line works OK without playing the timeline at the same time because maybe that affects it.

TBH, I tried it out once, but I don’t remember that specific problem. I just liked the option of recording directly to Audacity a lot better.