sample rate? bit depth?

what is sample rate and bit depth? and how do i know what to set them at?

You set it all in Project Settings, or while rendering.

This all depends on what your soundcard supports. There is no purpose in using higher sample rate and bit depth, if all your soundcard can do is record in 44.1 and 16-bit. Try to find out what sample rates and bit depths your soundcard supports (which soundcard is it anyways?), and then decide. I usually don't see any point going over 44.1 and 16-bit for the usual home projects. The higher samplerate and bit depth, the more hard drive space your recorded audio consumes!

44.1 or 48 kHz sample rate, 24 bit is good enough for most recordings. remember CD quality is 44.1kHz/16bit. you could also search these forums for passionate debates on the subject. cheers.

manning, this all depends on the quality of your input. Also some VSTs can generate frequencies that are higher than 22050 Hz which is Nyquist limit for 44.1 (the highest frequency that can be written before aliasing kicks in). You may not hear those frequencies, but they do have some psychoacoustic importance. 88200/24 seems very good if you're gonna do a CD redbook afterwards - because it's a multiple of 44100, resampling will be done in a cleaner way - it's generally not recommended to resample from/to sample rates that are not integer multiples of themselves.

EvilDragon you obviously know yer stuff mate.. but do two things. 1. run the bit pattern test...at 88.2. n see the wasted disk space. oodles of padding. remember reap is pounding audio into 64 bit mem buffers. n the plug in is operating on those mem buffers AFTER being read from disk. n PRIOR TO being output to the sound device. 2. do a frequency analysis of old past classic hits that sold zillions. eg load up an old hit song , n look at its freq's in reafir for example. if you do number 2 it gives one a whole different perspective on the importance of frequencies above 10k. i know it did moi when i did it. big steep roll offs. or even way before 10k. god bless.

Old recordings aren't representative. Try to frequency analyze some remastered SACDs and/or DVD-audio and see what you get.

Without going into arcane technical detail... I record at 24 bits (which everyone should do) and 44.1khz (which is good enough).