With MP3 and other audio formats, it is important to use the same sample rate from recording to playback whenever possible. While you can convert the sample rate at any time, sample rate converters almost always produce artifacts. The following sample rates are ideal for various applications:
To convert music CDs to MP3, for example, using our media player instructions, it is better to use the original 44100 Hz sample rate.
DVD and BluRay sound is generally stored and played at 48,000 samples per second. So here you should stick to the 48 kHz sample rate. When converting 96 kHz audio to MP3, 48 kHz often sounds better than 44.1 kHz.
For pure voice recordings using a sound recorder or other software, a sampling rate of 8 to 9 kHz is sufficient, since small microphones above 4 to 5 kHz contain little sound energy.
If the sound quality of radio plays and audiobooks is not that important to you, because you want to carry as many stories as possible on an MP3 player, for example, use a sampling rate of 22050 Hz, although it is quite low. With half the sample rate, you can also cut the MP3 bit rate in half without losing quality.
If you digitize your old cassettes, 32 kHz was sufficient as the sample rate, because the tapes barely register frequencies above 16 kHz anyway. In other words, it would be unnecessary to use a higher sample rate.
What is the sample rate?
It is the speed with which “photographs” are taken (actually samples, in this case sound) and the more they are taken per second, the higher quality will be obtained. Think that the sound is represented by curves, and a curve will draw better the more detail or more dots it contains. It is impossible to represent well a curve with 3 segments, even with 10. The more segments it has, the more faithful it will be and the more similar it is to the original.
Because the quality is exactly that: how similar is the encoding to the original version. And there are two factors that count a lot: Sample rate and bitrate. Of course, the higher the sample rate and the higher the bitrate we will find a greater utilization of the disk space, which at this point is not usually a priority.
The size it occupies on the hard disk
Recall that the mp3 emerged precisely as a solution to save space on the hard disk. It was unmanageable to pretend to have a large music collection in WAV format (original format, without compression) on one of those small hard drives from a few years ago.
On the other hand, trying to download a complete WAV of a song from the internet or transfer it from one computer to another was also unmanageable, since they took up too much disk space.
Then the mp3 and later all the other compression formats, sought to achieve a good audio quality occupying perhaps 10 times the space that a WAV occupied.
