Re: [linux-audio-user] Ardour and DAT

On Wed, Jul 20, 2005 at 10:37:48 +0530, ISh wrote:
> 1. Now a lot of field recordings and Music in on Cd (16bit ,44Khz)
> format. And I am working with 48Khz ,16bit on the jackd(deamon) and on
> ardour. Now if I oversample/ ?resample at a higher rate? in ardour by
> importing it in the 'Auditions' region i.e. basically from 44Khz to
> 48Khz. Will I loose out on quality. Is the Ardour re-sampler good enough
> to handle this conversion.

Will they definatly only accept 48k DAT? I was under the impression that
DATs are now often 44.1k as well. OTOH digital radio (in the UK at
least) is 48k, so it seems reasonable.

The Ardour resmapler (SRC) is pretty good as long as you select a decent
sinc interpolation. You will loose qlauilty, but I doubt if you will hear
the difference.
 
> 2. Or, should I work with 16bit-44Khz setting (on jackd/Ardour) and
> export the final mixed session once finished to 16bit-48Khz(DAT) . So I
> can take the dump of the final session on DAT tapes. Will this way be
> better than the point(1) above in which all the audio is individually
> re-sampled at

Resampling can be quite time consuming, so forthat reason you might want
to convert at the end, as its easier to batch process it, and you may end
up converting less material. It wont make much difference to the quality.
 
> 3. I have a 'Tascam DA-P 1' DAT recorder on which I have to dump the
> final edit. So how do I go about this. Should I play the audio in Ardour
> only and the send it to the DAT recorder. Or should i play the exported
> file in a player like Alsaplayer/ Audacity(which plays audio rec at
> 48Khz ???) and then take the dump through SPDIF out into the DAT
> recorder. Is this possible to do the above mentioned process(s) any
> other way, which might be better.

The choice is between sending it over SPDIF at 48k (involving a resampling
stage), or over analogue (hopefully balanced) I guess? It depends on your
feelings about analogue v's digital noise, personally I would go with
SPDIF. The app that you use to send the audio out over shouldn't make any
difference, but make sure your buffers are large.
 
> Basically Im dealing with a lot of audio at 44KHz which has to mixed
> together and the final output will be on 48Khz(DAT Tape). What could be
> the best way to deal with it so that there is no or very little loss in
> quality. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I would say that a high quality sinc resampler will be the best quality.
You shouldn't be able to distinguish th resampled audio from the original,
but you sould experiemnt, of course.

- Steve
Received on Wed Jul 20 12:15:10 2005