What sample rate do you work with?

How to do this, that and the other. Share, learn, teach. How did X do that? How can I sound like Y?
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

zerocrossing wrote: What many say is correct. If the plug in is doing what it's doing correctly, you shouldn't have to run things at 96khz and, in fact, running them at that rate doesn't give you any audible advantage. Some things did sound a bit better, but overall the tax on the system (I like to run things in real time) just isn't worth it. Some plug ins, like Reaktor, let you run things at higher sample rates than the project itself is running at and things like audio rate modulated sounds do sound a bit better, but again, you pay a price.
What about EQs? There's little reason to oversample EQs but they sound more natural at 96khz. The algorithms inside an EQ are so simple and fast that oversampling is a terrible option to prevent nyquist frequency warping. Not only does it put a downsampling filter on every instance of the EQ but it also adds quantization noise from doing more calculations. If the EQ has non-linearities, oversampling makes sense, but otherwise is worse overall, in speed and fidelity.

Post

48khz 32-bit float. Used to use 44khz... but use the AxeFX now and it only works at 48khz.

I'd use 22 if I could get away with it. Old man ears can't hear much above 12k anyway. Bloody telomeres.

Post

My car stereo's usb will only play WAV files at 16-bit. But I noticed it will play them at 48khz, so I export at that over 44.1 to compensate for the loss of bit depth.

Post

24-bit 48kHz. Haven't tried higher values because of the weak machine.

Post

I use 48 kHz 16-bit FLAC for shared upload tunes and 48 kHz 32-bit float for archived tunes.
My USB audio interface/monitors can't go higher than 48 kHz anyway.

I don't hear aliasing in my VSTi synths so I really don't care about upsampling/high sample rates.
48 is adequate for human hearing.
Download & play soothing music: https://soundcloud.com/wait_codec

Post

Just out of curiousity, because I see this more and more, why are people using 48kHz instead of 44.1? I can see it if you're working to video, but for audio I never understood it when you have to SRC to 44.1kHz anyway. What reasons are people here finding that they prefer 48 for?

Post

48 khz = THE standard for film post production sound.

Post

I did say "I can see it if you're working to video". :)

Post

Why I use 48 kHz...

I might want to make videos for my tunes later on and any implicit benefit to using something higher than 44.1 kHz will be there already.
Some people say using higher sampling rates disperses minor EQ errors in a way that is less audible. I don't really know much about it. But I don't want to stress my system too much if it's true. 88.2/96 kHz seems like overkill.

Supposedly the higher rate causes lower latency. This might affect my MIDI latency, so I'd like to have a little edge on that if it's true. But if it's not, then at least I'm not losing as much CPU power as if I'd used 88.2 or 96 kHz. I'm on Linux using Wine so I have to be mindful of performance terms with REAPER.

But FL Studio's built-in help actually discourages using any sample rate other than 44.1 kHz for their plugins, so I don't use it there. But then again, FL Studio's CPU requirements are more than my system can handle so I hardly use it except for the step editor (for drum samples).
Download & play soothing music: https://soundcloud.com/wait_codec

Post

The better question is why on earth did anyone ever use 44100?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz

If you read the article you'll find 44100 is crap. It's chosen for compatibility with the NTSC standard established in 1941.

1941.

This stuff is all completely obsolete.
Free plug-ins for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Xhip Synthesizer v8.0 and Xhip Effects Bundle v6.7.
The coder's credo: We believe our work is neither clever nor difficult; it is done because we thought it would be easy.
Work less; get more done.

Post

Short answer - it doesn't matter. I work at whatever sample rate the files handed to me are. If that doesn't dictate then it's 44.1
Mastering from £30 per track \\\
Facebook \\\ #masteredbyloz

Post

96 if my CPU lets me get away with it.

48 if compromising, 44.1 if I must.

Post

Hmm - If I Could choose it'd be in the low 80's or high 70's. Less clipping from what I've been taught.
That does not mean that I'm right.
My Music Site: http://www.leattol.com
My Amazing 32 Bit Win EQ: LA bands 15 band EQ

Post

aciddose wrote:The better question is why on earth did anyone ever use 44100?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz

If you read the article you'll find 44100 is crap. It's chosen for compatibility with the NTSC standard established in 1941.

1941.

This stuff is all completely obsolete.
Unlike the video resolution of old NTSC, the "cd quality" format was good enough to last a very long time. Low resolution video wasn't, but it still stuck around anyway (I hated it well before HDTV came along, because I was used to looking at "high resolution" computer displays (also a joke, compared to print resolution).

I can't hear any difference between 44.1/16-bit and higher resolutions. Admittedly, I don't go looking for it, and I've only one SACD and DVD-A (both are NIN "the downward spiral" rereleases, which was an album created on 44.1/16-bit hardware in the first place. But damn can I tell when things are lesser resolution!

I also hate compression. Most people can't even tell. They listen to shitty YouTube video songs, 128kbps MP3s (often both through shitty laptop or even tiny mono cell phone speakers), worse via streaming music services, and they still listen to poorly tuned radio reception... and it doesn't bother them. We've gone backwards in audio quality since the Internet came along and only we music making freaks have noticed.
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

Post

aciddose wrote:The better question is why on earth did anyone ever use 44100?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz

If you read the article you'll find 44100 is crap. It's chosen for compatibility with the NTSC standard established in 1941.

1941.

This stuff is all completely obsolete.
Or was it the first ADAT recorders that as I understand were VCR in basic machine - that in turn was NTSC from Japan and US?

I remember reading the first midi specs and how it's bitrate frequency 31250 was determined from a simple divide of a common and cheap quartz crystal - to make interfaces cheap.

A lot of coincidences like these set a standard...

Post Reply

Return to “Production Techniques”