Damn 24 bit!!!

  • Thread starter Thread starter pdadda
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pdadda

pdadda

Captain Sea Boots
I have always recorded at 16 bit/44.1 kHz. But when my band was tracking at my house tonight, I decided to try 24 bit/88.2 kHz. Everything went well, and 4 hours later we had 2 good songs almost completed. I saved it all and ate some food. When I went back to listen again later, everything was at chipmunk speed. I rechecked some old files I had recorded at 16 bit/44.1 kHz, and they were all fine. Please tell me I can salvage this night of recording.
Here's what I'm using. MOTU 828mkii and Tracktion (on a PC). ANy help would be awesome. Thanks in advance.
 
You have the sample rate set wrong (for playback) somewhere. Are you sure you were recording at 88k? It is just a setting somewhere that is affecting the playback. if you have wavelab or something that will tell you what the sample rate of the files are, you could use that to look at one of the tracks to see what is really going on.
 
I am positive that I recorded the tracks at 24 bit/88.2 kHz. I set every setting on the MOTU and in Tracktion to play back at those settings. Same problem with everything playing back really fast.
Then one of my bandmates noticed that each individual clip had a panel that said speed on it. When he dropped that from 1 to .5, the speed was fine. But since there were a lot of individual clips, it threw the spacing of all of them off. I can go back and readjust them manually, but surely I shouldn't have to do this every time! Unless I can figure out what went wrong, I think I'm going back to 16/44.1.
But here's one thing I really liked about recording with 24 bits. I currently don't have any compressors, and tracking drums at 16 bit without a compressor is quite a pain. At 24 bit, I could set the levels so they never went above -10dB during sound check. Then when my drummer rocked out during actual recording, it was MUCH easier to avoid clipping.
 
88.2 is rather uncommon to use.

I still tend to use 24/48khz when I record.
 
OK, I am dumb and figured it made more sense to use a sample rate that was a multiple of what the eventual CD 44.1 format would be.
 
Why don't you just do 24bit/44.1? It is the sample rate that is messing with you right now. That is the only thing that will affect the speed of playback.
 
I could be wrong, but I think that you might have to setup the MOTU for the higher sample rate every time, before playing back those 88.2 sessions, maybe it is resetting itself to the lower sample rate when it's booting up, and then when you open one of the 88.2 SR projects, the MOTU is staying at 44.1, that would make sense with the info that dropping the clip speed by half fixes it.

I have an 828mkII, but only use 24/44.1 for my stuff.
 
The recording should be alright

The recording should be alright - because you recorded at 88.2 KHz, it's playing at a faster speed. There's twice as much sound information as a regular CD quality sound file when it comes to sample rate. The 24 bit factor isn't an issue when it comes to the too-fast playback. Just make sure that the project is really playing back at 88.2 KHz, instead of 44.1.

I do all my serious recording at 24-bit 88.2 KHz - it's a good idea if you don't want to worry about low quality sample rate conversions if you don't have top-rate equipment (as in good sample converters). You could easily end up with much worse quality recording at 96 KHz or 48 KHz and then converting to 44.1 KHz if you have bad sample rate converters than if you just recorded at the standard 44.1 KHz cd quality sample rate.

Still, recording at 44.1 still isn't too bad either - I believe it is more important to record at 24-bit than it is to record at a higher sample rate than 44.1 KHz. Either way, your recording should be alright - you just probably need to tweak some settings either with your hardware or software when it comes to playback.

All the best,
Craig
 
OK, I ended up figuring it out (actually one of my bandmates). This sounds odd, but I had to start Tracktion with the MOTU on and set at 44.1. Then, I went to the settings menu and changed the sample rate to 88.2 kHz. The actual MOTU unit still says 44.1kHz on the front, but the setting in Tracktion says 88.2. Then it works fine. Before I was doing all this and then hitting "restart device" in the settings menu to get the MOTU to show 88.2kHz on the front. I don't know why this works, but I'm glad it did. Thanks for all the advice.
 
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