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Asked: 2020-07-01 22:16:16 +0800 CST

Yeti Nano flashes yellow in Ubuntu Studio 20.04

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First of all excuse any bad english since it's not my native language.

I just installed Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and plugged in my Yeti Nano Microphone. It picks up sound just fine but as soon as I try to play sound over the integrated external sound card of the microphone the button starts flashing yellow and I can't hear a thing. I've done some research and found out that it could be due to a sampling rate mismatch. But I have no clue how to fix that. Sometimes when I use Spotify it works but as soon as I play audio via Firefox for example it stops. To make it more confusing is the fact that it worked before on one other distro (Linux Mint 19). But eventually it stopped working there to. I tried reinstalling Mint but that doesn't fix the problem. I don't know why it stopped working and I haven't got it to work on any other distro even arch based ones like Manjaro. I have one last idea what could have caused the problem but I don't know how that could have effected it. It stopped working on Mint around the time I installed windows in a dualboot. I kept the install since then. It would be very weird if Windows caused this to happen because I can't explain how they could interfere in such a way but maybe that's a starting point for you all.

Any help is very appreciated since I need to use this output because my bult-in audio is useless.

Many thanks in advance!

sound microphone soundcard external-soundcard

2 Answers

  1. Yeti nano only deal with 48kHz.

    You have to set your default setting as 48kHz and not 44.1kHz. You can add this line :

    default-sample-rate = 48000

    in ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf for local setting or in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf for global setting (needs to be root). then restart pulseaudio with

    $ pulseaudio -k

    (see https://medium.com/@gamunu/enable-high-quality-audio-on-linux-6f16f3fe7e1f)

    PS: to be more precise, since default alternate-sample-rate is 48kHz in pulse, it explains why it works when the source is already 48kHz (see https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/pulseaudio/pulse-daemon.conf.5.en.html)

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  2. Having played with this a little bit, the Yeti Nano (I think the original yeti may be different) actually can do both 44100 and 48000 (and 32000 as well). However, the yellow flashing indicates that the recording sampling rate and the playback sampling rate are currently set differently - so whatever rate it was last played to at is different to whatever it was last recorded from at. If this is the case you get no audio output (it still works fine as a microphone).

    So for example, find a 44100 and a 48000 sample wav file and try the following:

    aplay -D hw:CARD=Nano,DEV=0 48000.wav

arecord -D hw:CARD=Nano,DEV=0 -r 48000 -f S24_3LE -c 2 -d 1 > /dev/null

    Light should now be green.

    Now play the 44100 wav:

    aplay -D hw:CARD=Nano,DEV=0 44100.wav

    Light will now be flashing orange, because you've changed the playback sample rate, but not the recording one.

    Now record at 44100:

    arecord -D hw:CARD=Nano,DEV=0 -r 44100 -f S24_3LE -c 2 -d 1 > /dev/null

    Light goes green again, because now both playback and recording are set to 44100.

    (You may need to either stop pulseaudio or tell it to use other devices to be able to run this test as it uses the alsa interface directly).

    So I guess if you are having trouble playing audio to it, try the two different arecord commands to flip the sample rate until it goes green.

    Conversely if it is flashing when you are recording from it, try and play a 44100 or 48000 wav file at it to flip the playback rate to the other one.

    (I figured this out by snooping the USB on a Mac and changing the sample rate in the Blue Sherpa software, and noticed it always changed both input and output at the same time. Linux on the other hand only changes what it thinks it needs to at the time).

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