Arch Linux

efog4

Member

Registered: 2025-10-09

Posts: 23

Webcam Microphone High Pitch / squeaky distortion

Hello all,

I've been trying to use a logitech webcam microphone for various voice chat programs / online games but i am consistently having an issue with my audio input is heard in an alvin the chipmunkesque manner and based on my research it seems like something to do with the sampling rates not matching (uncertain)? regardless its resulting in unhappy social experiences online, I have been able to temporarily solve it every now and again by unplugging it and plugging it in again in various different usb ports on my computer but this does not always work and i'd like a more permanent fix.

I am having difficulties following walkthroughs and tutorials on the wiki and online such as this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu … _recording

because i am using pipewire-pulse and so certain commands such as pulseaudio -k does not work. I've tried creating ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf (did not exist before) and adding the line "default-sample-rate = 48000" but this did not seem to fix the issue.

Also tried

sudo cp /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf /etc/pipewire/
sudo nano /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf 

and changing

default.clock.rate = 44100
default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 44100 48000 ]

the default default.clock.rate was 48000 but neither 44100 or 48000 seem to solve the issue

edit: I actually forgot to uncomment the default.clock settings and after doing so and changing the it back to 44100 the audio is sometimes normal when using the arecord command but in firefox (online voice recorder) or discord the audio is still distorted with high pitch.

Any guidance is much appreciated

thank you!

p.s. If you need an example of what the recorded audio sounds like I would also appreciate tips on the best place to upload audio for sharing online!

I did the following and it helped I think but I can't tell if its fixed completely:
I have no idea what im doing

honestly i just added every sampling rate i could find to the default.clock.allowed-rates setting in /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf so now it looks like this:

default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 16000 44100 48000 88200 96000 176400 192000 352800 38400 ]

and I cross referenced every sampling rate i could see by first checking

arecord -l

and then checking every sampling rate by running

arecord -D hw:C,X --dump-hw-params /dev/null

where the C = card number and the X = device number from the output of the arecord -l

Last edited by efog4 (2026-03-15 06:04:45)