What sample rate is best for music production and why?

Discussion in 'Working with Sound' started by Bunford, Jul 26, 2022.

  1. BlackHawk

    BlackHawk Platinum Record

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    44.100 Hz / 32bit floating point (.wv)

    ...except I know I will get problems, that could be solved by using 88.200 Hz like somewhat extreme time stretching or retuning or such. Everything else is wasting time, energy and of course CPU-cycles.
     
  2. ElMoreno

    ElMoreno Kapellmeister

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    For me everything is a business.
    Do we want to understand or not that high fidelity died many years ago? The end! :(

    Almost all the kids I know (and many older people) listen to music on their computers, with their mobile phones lay on top of the table and use 128/192 kbps mp3s and... that's fine. They hear no difference, their ears are no longer used to hearing quality music. This is the reality, you have to take note of it... that's all!
    They want at most to sing a nice tune and don't give a damn about all the mental trips we have with khz and bitrate at a million kbps or more... :)

    Just my 5 cents
     
  3. clone

    clone Audiosexual

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    24 bit 48khz. 24 bit is modern DAW session bit depth. 48khz accurately represents up to 24Khz sounds correctly. For my purposes, it is sufficient.
     
  4. PifPafPif

    PifPafPif Rock Star

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    Some plugins don't like 48 kHz
    So i stick with 44.1 / 24
     
  5. No Avenger

    No Avenger Audiosexual

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    Due to aliasing, sure.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
  6. PifPafPif

    PifPafPif Rock Star

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    That's a nice argument. And even years ago, a lot of albums where recorded in strange conditions.

    This album was recorded with guitar into an HM2 into a Peavey Bandit 1st gen packed into foam (ghetto iso cab) :


    Who cares ?
    Not me :wink:
     
  7. Baxter

    Baxter Audiosexual

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    Snap! I'm back in 1998 and online forums on dial-up modem. Same question. I'm also missing the "what DAW has the best audio engine?". :rofl:

    88.2kHz SR is "the best"! Maybe. :rofl:
     
  8. ElMoreno

    ElMoreno Kapellmeister

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    Great guitar for me in its dark metal style... does its dirty and great work! :metal:
     
  9. junh1024

    junh1024 Rock Star

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    YOu can hear the higher frequencies if you have a bad resampler.

    content at inaudible higher frequencies also slightly reduces headroom at the audible range.
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2022
  10. ArticStorm

    ArticStorm Moderator Staff Member

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    I thought its 22.1kHz 12bit or 8bit for the best LoFi sound?
     
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  11. VincentCool

    VincentCool Member

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    48k/24bit
     
  12. tzzsmk

    tzzsmk Audiosexual

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    well, there isn't much helpful answers yet, so let me share some thoughts (maybe some of those are wrong, but that's how I see things):

    48kHz is the standard for video, so if you're producing aiming for music videos of film scoring, working at 48kHz will make your life much easier
    44.1kHz is the CD standard, if you're working mostly with those, better stick with 44.1kHz in whole audio chain,

    using 96kHz or 88.2kHz respectively, may be useful for recording, especially if you're doing more sound design stuff and extreme time/pitch stretching, but it adds additional load on your computer (technically, 96kHz at 512 buffer size is about same as 48kHz at 256 buffer size) especially when plugins aren't really designed for high sample rates (for ex. Waves garbage doesn't work properly at 192kHz, all the processing like EQ is shifted at twice the frequencies), higher samplerate doesn't always make things sound better btw,

    nowadays, some plugins and DAWs can do oversampling (Reaper for ex. can do that on its own per-plugin, or per-FX chain, even if plugin maker didn't put such functionality into the plugin itself), which is a very handy thing if you're using non-linear processing plugins such as saturation and distortion, where harmonics generated above the usable frequency spectrum get crippled backwards to the lower frequencies,
    similarly limiters and other dynamics processors with true-peak functionality basically upsample audio to achieve that true-peak, intersample-peak calculations accuracy,

    another important area where samplerate matters is when you're using Impulse Responses, such as reverbs or guitar amp sims - you absolutely want those IR samplerates match your project/plugins so it produces intended results (unless you're intentionally doing sound design or synth stuff to sound more artificial)

    watch these two videos if you're truly interested in the topic:





    :chilling:
     
  13. Bandit

    Bandit Producer

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    44.1/24bit is fine. Going higher depends on extreme processing you might do, there are several videos on youtube explaining the bullshit and/or use to go and work at higer rates. It depends on a few things, but mostly not necessary.
     
  14. Lieglein

    Lieglein Audiosexual

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    Thank you for making my original statement more popular. :shalom:
     
  15. tzzsmk

    tzzsmk Audiosexual

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    other valid argument is plugins which don't support it (looking at you, Waves)
     
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