Hey dudes,thinking of setting up my own little buisness selling samples online,can some one explain to me what the benefits of running everything at 96khz as opposed to plain ole 44.1 to me,now I know it’s a higher sample rate and it captures audio much better,but I’m wondering what’s the practicality of this since the difference between an audio source captured at 44.1 and 96 is indistinguishable to our ears?or am I wrong?also I’m wondering what’s the optimal bit rate I shud use?i see there’s signed and unsigned and all this crazy crap 
Well, one real practicality is that offering a higher sample rate seems more premium, pro, higher quality. If you are selling them, you know.
Gives clearer high frequencies. You’ll only hear in a true 96khz chain from recording to sample to speaker. Maybe using high rates in mixing/resampling, and with effects, with 96khz you counter degradation a little, even if the end result is converted to 44.1. The extra frequencies possible are not reason for high rates, it’s rather about being able to represent more details in the high freqencies. I think most recording gear would filter out stuff above around 20khz anyways. I found with good recordings you can hear a difference, where 44.1 sounds a bit more sharp, flat and tinny in the high end - while with 96khz there’s sorts of depth, transparence and clearness possible, that you’ll normally only hear in the low/mid frequencies at 44.1khz. It’s very subtle though.
More important is 24bit vs 16bit, when the samples have headroom, no compressed dynamics and like this. Gives sort of headroom before degradation starts. Subtle also. Well, musicians always want the best quality sometimes, so why not.
FTW: dude uses 96khz only, runs daw at it, goes mayhem…then renders, converts to 44.1 and compresses mp3 128kbps…
I’d give the customers the option to choose which sample rate they want. The more options like this, the more ‘professional’ it looks i guess.
96KHz is a pretty damn good idea, especially if you are planning to offer samples that are not going to be played in any particular pitch.
Imagine playing a 44.1KHz sample one octave below - it just become half that rate. Two octaves below, one quarter etc.
So I’d highly recommend bumping up the Hz - even if it’s not about superior audio quality, it just makes the samples more useful.
It is like global over sampling, isn’t it? If you render at 96khz and later re sample to 48khz, yu would have 2x oversampling, so less aliasing even with old vst…
If you record analog gear or even just softsynths, keep in mind a good spectral view/analysis. Many people can’t even hear 15khz, kids sometimes up to 20khz. Producers don’t have bat-ears, too. You’ll want clean results without something going on that wastes the sound, or becomes aparrent when pitching down an octave. If you render some softsynths at 96khz, there might be harmonics going on way above of what you can hear. Depending on the whole gear and setup ofc.
Jurek, yes, try running renoise at 96khz, and compare the aliasing of some pitched up sawwave with running at 44.1. Aliasing is happening more and more in the inaudible range the higher the rate, not always though, the border is just shifted up. When downsampling the final result, you quasi “chop” off the (hopefully inaudible) aliasing. Or you can use strong lp filters here and there in case aliasing or high harmonics fuck up with some distortion or the like. But this isn’t about global rates, but the quality of base materials/samples, that will alias maybe further on when processed, but not by default.
Wow thanks dudes,this forum is always so helpfull.Now what about bit rate?there is options for 32 bits in the raw audio import section,there is float,signed,unsigned etc. there is also header bytes that I don’t understand and big-endian,can anyone explain these options to me?i gather that these options are only applicable to audio that has been dragged into Renoise and are tools that handle which way Renoise imports them?
raw audio import section
You can safely ignore those settings for your intended purposes here. They only apply when loading raw binary data or other unknown file types, where you must specify the sample properties yourself in order for Renoise to load the audio correctly.
Thank you very much,that’s everything sorted then,cheers dudes!have a good one.
in my experience, the few times I feel the need to go up from 44,1khz, I actually prefer using 88,2Khz instead of 96, that way you avoid unnecessary dithering-artifacts when you render down to 44 again, and the file sizes become slightly smaller… but to be honest I usually never can’t hear the difference between this and that, only sometimes, early in the morning after a good nights sleep 
Supply all the variants, most of the timemost ofyour userbase can’t tell the difference between bits and tits and don’t want to deal with problems anyway.