48khz -> 44.1khz = is there any advantage going down?

[Caine123]

hi guys, some years ago i decided to go 48khz and 24bit and recently i discussed with someone who said 48khz is not worthy, takes more performance and plugins might get buggy/glitchy?

i always thought 48khz is a golden standard and better quality when exporting and working with it. even when you upload wav on youtube, bandcamp etc. it is better to use than 44khz.

im confused! any experiences on this?

thx

[BertKoor]

Haven't we had this very discussion dozens and dozens of times before?

<tl;dr> What's your distribution target? Stick to that. At the end I'd stick with 48kHz and not lose too much sleep over it.</tl;dr>

48kHz is "not worthy"? I think you meant "not worth it".

The performance difference is roughly an extra (48-44.1)/44.1 = 9%. I'll tell you what happens if you currently have glitchiness and switch to the lower sample rate and that indeed fixes it. Eventually you'll throw in an extra CPU hog (or two) and you get the glitchiness back again. So you were already living on the edge of what your system can handle. Start saving up for something more powerful. Or review the necessity of using CPU hogs in the first place.

I think Youtube resamples everything to their own preferred internal format of 44.1kHz.
Q: Is any quality lost in the process?
A: You're talking about Youtube, so it doesn't really matter.

[CrystalWizard]

48K is fine, unless you are pressing CDs, then perhaps 44.1. Tracking maybe higher.

[lfm]

Most sample libraries I encountered are 44k, apart from Spitfire ones that I have since targeting film scoring that is 48k standard.

So 44k libraries resample realtime doing 48k projects and had no problem with that. If any more cpu doing that I did not notice. But some use simpler algo for realtime mixing and then best algo doing final export.

But daws like Cakewalk/Sonar can do upsampling to double or more of project sample rate in transparent fashion for certain complex waveforms like strings that benefit from less aliasing then. You set for each plugin and easy to turn on/off as you please for playback or just rendering.

As I recall Youtube have recommendation to have 48k uploading video.
So why resample in so many stages.
- if doing video you are set
- if doing audio only resample to 44k once. I encountered one player that did not like 48k in mp3 as an example.

[legendCNCD]

Go 48k, its the standard now. Changed to it, didnt look back, even with this 10 year old PC

[juanpablo]

48k, unless you have a slow computer, which case 44 is fine and used on CDs

[zerocrossing]

You will use a bit less CPU and memory, but unless you’re using an ancient computer, don’t worry about it. Sounds to me like your friend formed his opinion in the 90s and has yet to revise it.

[Caine123]

thanks a lot guys! do you know how much overall you save around? i mean is it about only a few % or maybe 5% or so?

i was wondering myself too but also at the same time maybe he is right?
where i use music:
CDr
Youtube
Social MEdia overall
maybe testing Spotify
Bandcamp

and i think all these platforms use/convert to 44.1 khz anyway?

if so, why should i use 48khz?

thx

[BertKoor]

Do you want to have a short argument, or the full two hours?

The performance difference is roughly an extra (48-44.1)/44.1 = 9%.

[Caine123]

Do you want to have a short argument, or the full two hours?

The performance difference is roughly an extra (48-44.1)/44.1 = 9%.

thx do you know if a sample conversion from 48khz -> 44.1khz is worse than have a 44.1khz exported audio file first place?