Down-sampling audio while streaming on YouTube/Vimeo

Is this a widely known fact?

I didn't know.

As long as you're working with uncompressed audio, I wouldn't worry about changing sample rates from 48kHz to 44.1kHz or vice versa too much.   I'd worry a little bit more about bit depth changes, so 24-bit to 16-bit or (hopefully not) 8-bit.  When it comes to changing sample rates, pitch changes are usually the thing to keep an ear out for (PR, AE and AU shouldn't introduce any).

If you have control over it in your workflow, it wouldn't hurt to maintain sample rate and bit depth at the highest settings possible from source footage to edit settings to edited master.  So, if receiving a music mix for a music video at 44.1kHz, you could set your Sequence settings to match and export to that as well.  But if you left the Sequence at 48kHz, the slight up-sample won't hurt anything (it just won't add anything) as PR cleanly handles the sample rate change.

As far as YouTube and Vimeo go, you could worry a little bit about introducing AAC compression at 320 kbps; however, as long as the source is uncompressed 48kHz or 44.1kHz or 32kHz 24-bit or 16-bit the resulting file should sound pretty good.

-Warren

The audio settings for video files has always seemed rather ... messy. Different formats & codecs do slightly different things, and so even in the encoding you may think you're getting one thing, then ... check say through MediaInfo, and find that actually the created isn't exactly what you thought.

Now ... throw in uploading and then downloading & playback on any one computer. Those can all be throwing a brick in the process.

Coming into video post from somewhat of an audiophile background, I wanted everything at LEAST at 48k, if not 96! And found it odd that most software seemed to assume 44.1k. But in talking with the others in aisles at NAB the last few years, so much of the hardware in broadcast, cable, and satellite use is built around 44.1k, that it auto-changes anything coming in to that setting. Trying to get anything to actually stay in 48k through export, uploading, storage on the service, downloading from their service, and travel over the ISP's system into a specific computer is probably an exercise in total futility.

So ... 44.1k is pretty much the highest sampling rate you can guarantee ... and actually get delivered especially via the web.

It is what it is ... trite and annoying phrase, but ... accurate here.

Neil