Sample rate question

[Sip]

I just did a crap load of work, and I'm not sure, I might have to do it again. I imported some waves that were recorded on Pro Tools. Everything sounded great in CE, but after I burned it, and played on my stereo I could hear high pitched, sorta synth/sorta harmonics. I went back and listed to both the track from my CD and the wave in CE on my computer. The CD track had the problem, but the wave didn't. I looked at the properties of both files. The CD track is 44100Hz, and my file in CE is 48000Hz. Everything is all done. Can I just convert the final waves to 44100 and just burn the disk again, or do I have to go back to the start, convert the raw waves when I was in 32 bit, and do the process again???

I'm kinda on a deadline, so if someone can help me out that would be way cool.

Thanks

[George Life]

Sip,
It's fairly simple: Open your final mix in CEP go EDIT>CONVERT SAMPLE TYPE and select 44.1kHz/16bit.
That's it!

[Sip]

Cool! I'm not going to loose any quality am I? Would it have been better to convert it to 44100 before my editing or dithering to 16 bit???

Thanks

[George Life]

Difference between 48kHz and 44.1 kHz is that the first one allows you recording sound frequencies of up to 24kHz, as opposed to "only" 22.05kHz when using 44.1kHz. Use Frequency analyser in CEP and check how much of your recording is in this range. Answer: probably nothing at all!

In other words, when working on a new project:
- Convert everything to 44.1kHz/32-bit
-Stay there during the whole recording/editing/mixing/mastering process.
-When you're ready for a transfer to a CD, convert to 44.1kHz/16bit and burn it!

[knowdoubt]

Actually it would be best to leave it at 48 all the way through the mixing, editing & mastering, then convert your final 2 track mix to 44.1 then dither down to 16 bit. There are sonic advantages to mixing/editing/mastering at higher sample rates. Many respected pro's actually upsample before mastering. Also you don't want to downsample any more than necessary as there is always risk of some degeneration which you wouldn't want to accumulate by downsampling every individual wav.

As to the question of quality loss, depends on the quality of the downsampling algorithm. Obviously the one used to burn your CD (I assume by your CD burning program) was not very good.