» Sampling Rates, and New Songs on the Burner [- mass konfuzion.com -]: Music, Life, etc.

A couple of nights ago, I was at my buddy’s place when I decided that I should browse masskonfuzion.com from his computer and give him a little showcase of my madd awesomeness. I proudly navigated to the Player page, where to my chagrin, I discovered that a few of the songs played at the wrong pitch.

[Begin Nerd Alert]

I think the reason is that the default sampling rate of the sound cards on both computers I use to test this site are 48 kHz, when everybody and their mother knows that most sound cards (as well as all CDs) are 44.1 kHz. What’s that, you say? You didn’t know that? Oh, well read up.

My hypothesis is that the player the site uses to stream mp3′s to your computer is “tuned” to play mp3s encoded with the traditional 44.1 kHz sampling rate. But since my weapons (read: computers) are, by default, set to encode mp3s with a 48 kHz sampling rate, the website player gets “confused.” Basically, the effect was similar to what you’d hear if you took a 45 RPM LP and played it at 33 RPM. In other words, the songs sounded slower and lower-pitched than they should have. But I fixed that this weekend. So, the moral of the story is check your sampling rates, kids.

[End Nerd Alert]

In other news, I got the wonderful opportunity to check out a phat (relatively) new album by a Chicago-based electronic duo, Walter Meego. The album is called Voyager, and you might recognize the song, “Forever,” from the Heineken beertender commercials. But I digress… The reason I brought them up is that nearly immediately after hearing the first 5 songs of the album, I got inspired to whip up some new stuff myself. Hopefully by this same time next week, you’ll be hearing it.

Ok, it’s way past my bed time and I have to wake up in the morning to resume my weekly corporate nomad lifestyle.