Basic Version Sample Rate

[Macy]

What is the sample rate of the Basic library?

The Basic version manual says, "We recorded every channel at 24-bit, 96 kHz resolution" - page 34

But then it says, "Choose 44100Hz—if available— for best results." - page 56

That seems pretty strange. Even if the Basic library is a sub-sampled version of the Pro version library, it would seem that 48 KHz (96 KHz/2) should then be the best choice.

[boulifb]

The basic edition is in 16bits.

It's written here:
http://www.garritan.com/products_steinway_versions.html

Cheers,

Fred.

[pascalM]

Once installed the Basic samples are at 44100Hz (16bit) that's why it says, "Choose 44100Hz—if available— for best results."

[Jeff Hurchalla]

The first manual pages refer to the recording sessions. We recorded the Steinway D at 96khz but the installed sample rate for all editions is 44100. The reason we used 96khz during recording was not so much for quality as to future proof the raw recordings for a time when large sample rates for software instruments might be worthwhile - in fact at the later Skywalker sessions for the B we recorded at an even larger 192khz for the same reason. It's always simple to downsample to 44100 (and with modern sample rate conversion there is no technological reason to prefer the conversion quality of 48khz over 44100) and you will have at least as much information intact as you would have gotten if the recordings were done at 44100. But the reverse is not true - you could not start with a recording done at 44100 and upsample to 96khz and retain all the information you would have had if you had recorded at 96khz.

So the reason the samples (on the dvds or downloads) are downsampled to 44100 is that there's only a very small quality benefit to 96khz or 192khz for piano, relative to 44100, and currently there's a huge downside to using the larger samplerates. The huge downside is that a samplerate of 96khz worse than halves the polyphony you can achieve playing from the keyboard, and 192khz worse than quarters the polyphony. In future years computers may certainly be powerful enough that this is irrelevant (for example, if you could achieve 10000 voices it wouldn't much matter if you limited yourself to a quarter of that), but today and for the foreseeable future the machines are not nearly powerful enough to make the polyphony sacrifice of using 96khz (or 192) a painless thing in relation to sample based software instruments.

This all is a behind the scenes discussion - you can still choose to configure the Steinway at 48khz or 96 or 192 or whatever. It's just typically preferable to set sample rate to 44100, because that's the sample rate of the samples already installed. Choosing a sample rate other than 44100 would mean the software would have to do real time sample rate conversion, which is not a big deal but still better not to do if you could easily use 44100 in the first place.

[Macy]

Thanks for the excellent explanation. I'm already in love with Garritan support.