Re: Sample Rate Conversion and Project Sharing Issues
2016/07/30 13:10:36
(permalink)
Hindsight is 20/20, but FWIW...
If he's using SONAR, he should have sent you Bundled (or Zipped) projects in the first place (my preference is to use .ZIP - smaller and less prone to re-open failures). That would have prevented the whole sample-rate issue, and also avoided sync problems that happen with MP3s because they necessarily always have some "dead air" at the beginning due to the compression process. It also would have ensured that the timeline was already synced, assuming everything was recorded to a click in the first place.
As you discovered, converting audio file sample rate outside of SONAR doesn't work as you would expect because SONAR stores the length of clips based on the number of samples. So when the up-converted file is referenced by the original clip, it ends up being truncated. If you down-convert, you get the opposite problem that clips have dead air at the end because there were fewer samples in the file than expected.
I think it's probably time for the Bakers to build-in a sample rate conversion capability, as the need comes up fairly frequently, and there's really no good workaround.
Otherwise the only option is to import audio into a new project that's been started at the desired rate or into a copy of the original project that's been stripped of all audio and re-opened with the new sample rate as the 'Default for New Projects' in Preferences. And this can be a chore, depending on how far along the source project is, and how the existing parts have been recorded.
SONAR Platinum x64, 2x MOTU 2408/PCIe-424 (24-bit, 48kHz)
Win10, I7-6700K @ 4.0GHz, 24GB DDR4, 2TB HDD, 32GB SSD Cache, GeForce GTX 750Ti, 2x 24" 16:10 IPS Monitors