24bit/96k conversion...

Hey all, got a quick question I hope some one can give me some insight on. I recorded some live drum sounds at a friends house at 24bit/96kHz. I brought them home and they sound great. I was thinking of putting them in my 1k, and i know I have to convert them to 16bit/44.1kHz. The problem is when i convert them in Audacity, I immediately notice a difference in the sound. My question is, if i use the mpc to record into Cubase sx3, and convert them back will my sounds return to the original sound or at least close to it? Or should I just use the sounds unconverted in something like Reason or Battery 3?
Oh yea, kinda off subject, anybody know if the midi key assignments can be changed in Reason, particularly ReDrum? The MPC starts at B0-like C4, B0 triggers the second group in ReDrum, while a keyboards C1 triggers the first, C# triggers the second, etc.

Hype wrote:Hey all, got a quick question I hope some one can give me some insight on. I recorded some live drum sounds at a friends house at 24bit/96kHz. I brought them home and they sound great. I was thinking of putting them in my 1k, and i know I have to convert them to 16bit/44.1kHz. The problem is when i convert them in Audacity, I immediately notice a difference in the sound.

i have a similar question... when a audio file is recorded at 24bit/96kHz and you sample that audio file into a 16bit/44.1kHz sampler doesn't it lose data? how can it be maintained in a 16bit/44.1kHz sampler or you just lose it and there is nothing you can do? i know you can convert it but...,

Try using a different sample rate conversion algorithm in a different program maybe. 24bit/96kHz will sound better than 16bit/44.1kHz but it shouldn't have to be glaringly obvious (although I admit to hardly ever recording/sampling at 24/96 with my RME soundcard). Try gently tweaking the eq after conversion. Remember you're probably going to be layering sounds on top of those drums too.

Sample rate conversion is destructive, so you lose the higher resolution when you convert the sample down to 44.1/16. You can't get back the 96/24 data that you had previously... it's gone. Think of it (in a very broad sense) like shrinking an image in photoshop from 1000x1000 to 500x500; when you zoom in to the 500x500 image and make it 1000x1000 on your screen you'll find the detail is gone, but much more so than you'll find your ears detecting the difference between 24bit/96kHz and 16bit/44.1kHz.

Hype wrote:The problem is when i convert them in Audacity, I immediately notice a difference in the sound.

did you add dithering?

Man... I'm still new to recording and all. Not to sure what it should be set to but Audacity has the following settings....


under Sample Rate Converter there are 2 drop downs one for Real-time and High-quality. Both of the boxes lets you choose 'High-quality Sinc interpolation or Fast Sinc Interpolation. Then next to each of those 2 boxes are 2 other drop downs under Dither. It give the choices of none, rectangle, triangle, & shaped. Orginally the real-time dither was set to off. But I think I just tried all combinations and the sound still comes out kinda awful.