What are bitrate and sampling rate, and how do they affect my audio files?
There are two things you should be concerned about when creating your audio files; those are sampling rate and bit rate. Sampling rate represents the sound frequency range. The higher sampling rate the file is, the wider the frequency range is. In other words, higher is better quality. Your lows will be lower, your highs will be higher. Lower rates can dampen the highs and lows so that audio quality is lower. You won’t notice that much on a cheap set of headphones, but on high quality ones you’ll notice a huge difference. Bit rate defines how many “bits” of space the file takes per second of audio. Obviously the higher the bit rate, the higher quality audio you’ll have. So for best quality, you want high sampling rates and high bit rates. Sampling rates do not affect file size as much as bit rates do, so if space is at a premium (like on an expansion card) a good tradeoff is to create high sampling rate files with a lower bit rate, or use a variable bit rate (VBR) with a moderately hig
