Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
What is Hertz?
Just don’t do it. Stay at 44.1 kHz.
It is from the days of evolving digital audio. Some HW started using 48k, so now we have that, but it leads to more problems than the extra 4kHz is worth, compared to any difference in quality.
The sample rate determines the upper limit of the frequency range you can capture. Human hearing tops out around 20kHz, and you need to at least double that frequency to adequately capture that top of the range. So 44.1 should be plenty, for listening and playback.
Higher sample rates are good to use in the mixing and manipulating stage, since you have tons of extra range in the audio spectrum. Like 96kHz is great for maintaining high fidelity as you twist, stretch, mangle, or polish your audio. But for most cases, you don’t really need that unless you have the studio equipment to even hear these benefits. 44.1 if fine for most “hobbyists”, as that is what I and most of us are, if we are being honest.
Comments
This can be a highly technical and contentious topic at times yet very crucial to understanding what’s significant to creating quality tracks. There’s also the related issues of problems with sample rate conversions on iOS devices, internal bitrates, audio interface sample rates, different apps and what sorts of sample rates they’ll accept, lo-fi down sampling, aliasing effects during synthesis, etc. . . . It’ll be nice to have this laid out nicely in a wiki to help people figure out these issues as they try to decide how they should proceed.
Let's start with basics. Hertz is nothing more than the standard unit of measure for frequency. 1 Hertz means 1 cycle per second. It is also used to describe sample rates in which cases it means 1 sample per second.
Sample rate is important because the frequency resolution of signals is connected to the sample rate. The highest frequency that can be reproduced is roughly one-half the sample rate.
Oversampling: while it is true that the highest frequency that can be represented is about one-half the sampling rate, it is also true that the fidelity of the representation can be improved in some cases by using much higher sampling rates. Samples are like pixels. They are discrete entities that we use to try to represent continuous signals. If you zoom in closely on a graphic representation of a sampled signal, you can sometimes see a stairstep effect or aliasing. In some cases, aliasing can be quite apparent. In digital signal processing and digital synthesis, waveforms are sometimes 'oversampled' and calculations done at two or four times the final sample rate in order to reduce aliasing artifacts. (Gross oversimplication).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing
p.s. Perhaps this topic should be called Sample Rate -- since I think that is the germane issue.
@espiegel123, you are correct but I would not recognize"sample rate" as I only think of 44.1 kHz... maybe "The Truth Hertz"?
That is all the more reason to educate people.