Changing Audacity’s Sampling Rate To 48,000 Hz

hey there it’s David H Lawrence the 17th
I heard from a student the other day who
got an email from a client she was doing
an audiobook for and the client was like
I’d like to increase the quality of my
book so could you please do your
recording at 48,000 sample rate 48,000
Hertz I’ve heard that’s better you know
this is a is a wonderful opportunity to
say this is why you hold the hand of
your clients when you’re doing
audiobooks so they don’t make mistakes
like this 48,000 Hertz as a sampling
rate is used for video and for films but
not for audiobooks audiobooks are always
sampled at 44100 Hertz or samples and
what this means basically is how many
samples per second how many discrete
pieces of data per second sound is
broken up into and described in that
data so for example one second of sound
at 44100 is cut up into forty-four
thousand one hundred individual slices
and each one of those slices is assigned
a value and then when it’s played back
all of those things all the slices that
were recorded are stuck together and
played back and that’s why you get
really great sound forty eight thousand
is more samples but it causes some
issues with other pieces of software
that work on your sound especially in
mp3 so we want to stick with 44100 so
having said that i’m happy to talk to
you about using audacity and changing
the sample rate what you’re seeing on
the screen is just a real quick track
that I recorded and if you’ll notice in
the lower left hand corner of the
recording window it says the project
rate is 44100 now I can drop that menu
down that is the sample rate for this
particular track and I can change it to
48,000 for the future but it’s not going
to change this tracks this track sample
rate that’s still gonna be 44100 so I’m
gonna put that back so I don’t forget um
if I wanted to change this tracks
sample rate and cut it up into more
slices I would then go up to the tracks
menu and choose the resample option and
then this too has a drop-down menu and I
changed that to 48,000 and then what
happens is it just basically goes in and
resamples everything so but the project
rate you’ll note is still 44100 just
this track has been resampled that’s one
way now if overall you decide you’re
gonna be doing nothing with video work
and you want to go ahead and change the
sample rate for all of your projects not
just the new tracks that are that are
coming then you want to set it overall
in audacity’s preferences and in
preferences there’s a pane called
quality and right here you see the same
drop down menu so you can choose 48,000
you can choose whatever you want it goes
very high 96,000 is for high def sound
but we want to keep things at 44100
that’s really what we want to do because
that’s what everybody uses that’s what
everybody should be using and that’s
what you want to push back a little bit
on your client and say yeah I know it
sounds like it’s really good but for
audiobooks you want to keep it at 44100
that’s how the industry works and really
be firm about that because you can screw
up your production process if you decide
to start changing sampling rates in the
middle of things or even at the
beginning of things because audible for
example expects things to be sampled at
44100 and by the way that’s CD quality
right if you play any CD any CD you’ve
gotten it is sampled those little silver
discs you remember those they’re sampled
at 44100 which means a three and a half
minute song would have about 9.2 million
pieces of data that were recorded
digitally and then are reconstituted to
play that three and a half minutes worth
of music so it’s very high quality audio
files would poopoo that but you know
audio books aren’t audiophile quality
audio anyway so there you go that’s how
to change it but don’t change it so any
comments on that was that confusing to
you did you understand that did I
efficiently scare you away from doing it
unless you’re doing video or film I hope
so
but that’s how to change it because
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YouTube will play it for you I’m David H
Lawrence xvii I so appreciate you
watching and I will talk to you tomorrow.