Yeti Nano flashes yellow in Ubuntu Studio 20.04

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).

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)