{ "schemaVersion": "v1", "slug": "what-is-sample-rate-and-bit-depth-and-why-does-it-matter", "title": "What is sample rate and bit depth? And why does it matter?", "kind": "solo", "listenUrl": "https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovemusicmore/episodes/What-is-sample-rate-and-bit-depth--And-why-does-it-matter-e1i8vch", "publishedAt": "2026-10-14", "source": { "provider": "whisper", "model": "faster-whisper:base", "normalizedSchema": "v1", "transcribedAt": "2026-06-09T10:53:40.117Z" }, "paragraphs": [ { "startSec": 0.08, "endSec": 24.78, "text": "Music Appreciation. What's up, dudes, this is Scoobert Doobert.Today we're going to be talking about recording and kind of like some of the magical mysteries" }, { "startSec": 24.78, "endSec": 47.98, "text": "about actually laying something down and turning it into audio that you can receive justlike I'm doing with this podcast, just like I'm doing with this background music.How do you do this sound-on-sound recording?How do you make things?Then I can share.But before we get into all of the nuances and the science and the vocab in the spirit" }, { "startSec": 47.98, "endSec": 73.02, "text": "of sharing, I was thinking about what this podcast is and I started it with the intentof sharing more about music so that music fans could get more out of music and so thatI as a creator could talk to other musicians and learn from them and in the process youlearn from us and we all get better what we do.But there's a secondary thing that I'm finding very interesting about doing a weekly" }, { "startSec": 73.02, "endSec": 96.38, "text": "podcast and turning this into like a tradition, something that has pace and something thathas sequence and where I have to check in.I'm finding that this is like becoming just as much of a diary of my like musical thoughtsand emotions and feelings as it is in my own music and my recorded work and one of the" }, { "startSec": 96.38, "endSec": 118.02, "text": "things that I find very powerful about being a music fan and being a musician is thesemoments are distilled and captured in the recorded medium in a way that's you know a littlebit richer than a photograph and a little bit different than a video with a photograph" }, { "startSec": 118.02, "endSec": 137.98, "text": "things are like pressed it's a moment that a glimpse a blink with a video it feels almostcomplete you are sitting there in that room again with recorded audio it blurs this line" }, { "startSec": 137.98, "endSec": 165.3, "text": "between fixed and flexible where you you can come back to a song or even a podcast ora story or an audio book or whatever poem and experience it very differently in differentsettings that I don't I don't necessarily know just like a casual video maybe you canbut I think that there's a certain richness of depth and it's been fun recording this" }, { "startSec": 165.3, "endSec": 187.29, "text": "mini podcast because it's like reflecting on what the medium itself is in my relationshipto it and in that like I want to talk about stuff that goes on in my life as this happenedso I want to integrate that more into this podcast because I think that's fun and this is alsokind of a fun medium to do it where it doesn't feel as like you to worry where it's like you won't" }, { "startSec": 187.29, "endSec": 209.21, "text": "believe what happened to me for example one of my gigs my first gig my first life performanceas Scoobert Doobert was canceled because the bus wouldn't start it was going to be a really coolmobile gig I'm sure I'll do it again sometime or is going to play on the rooftop of this busit was going to drive me around downtown San Diego and we'd stop at some bars and I play" }, { "startSec": 209.21, "endSec": 233.13, "text": "it's going to be super casual and fun for sure going to play other shows but you know it's a bummerwhen you kind of feel like you're building towards something that it goes away through like nofault I'm not even faulting the bus people like it just stuff happens man like in the same waywith recording like sometimes the computer doesn't turn on you know and I don't know like digesting" }, { "startSec": 233.13, "endSec": 257.21, "text": "all of that I want to relate this into recording and that there are two parts of you know the filetype that and like the way that the recording happens you have to decide at the very beginningand those are sample rate and bit depth and the reason why I had this whole intro was in part" }, { "startSec": 257.21, "endSec": 270.25, "text": "just to tell you a little bit about my life but also to like relate it to this kind of scientifictechnical these vocab terms the sample rate is the rate at which you're sampling something" }, { "startSec": 271.29, "endSec": 287.93, "text": "when you have a digital representation of something that is actually real you're taking thatyou're instead of replicating it you are creating the illusion of replicating it" }, { "startSec": 290.28, "endSec": 312.36, "text": "instead of having continuous waves like picture waves on the beach or like taking a slinky and goingup and down instead of having continuous things like that you're doing very similar a very similartechnique to what happens with movies where instead of it being continuous flow it's a series of" }, { "startSec": 312.36, "endSec": 335.48, "text": "images sped up so you have this frame rate that is at an adequate level that your eye thinks thatit's just a moving picture that it's actually a window into reality it's the same thing that we dowith music we choose the sample rate and the sample rate is the amount of little dots that it takes" }, { "startSec": 336.52, "endSec": 361.1, "text": "and these dots are ones and zeros so these are straight lines that these straight lines with enoughof them add up to look like a wave to look like a smooth wave so that's that's like what I when I talkabout with you know what is sample rate and what is recorded music there is room between the dots" }, { "startSec": 362.7, "endSec": 388.62, "text": "and there's there's some fun stuff that you can mess with with this in the same way that witha camera you can alter the frame rate and alter the perception of time alter if it feels old or newyou know like those like janky old movies where you know you can tell that it is a series of pictureslaid on top of each other you can do the same thing in music why don't I do that to my voice right" }, { "startSec": 388.62, "endSec": 410.94, "text": "now let me see if I can do this in real time so that I can interact with it as as you go so this isusing a plug-in to degrade the sample rate of my voice do you hear how the fundamental frequenciesthat it's grabbing is changing and it's losing its ability to become intelligible I like to use this" }, { "startSec": 410.94, "endSec": 429.9, "text": "effect a lot in music actually because as you can tell it's it's not exactly the same as you knowthings just chopping in and out of time this is things top shopping in and out of fidelity and Ithink that's super cool so that's sample rate that's like an example of sample rate going from 441" }, { "startSec": 430.46, "endSec": 439.98, "text": "down to what is this I brought it down to 19 oh 19 thousand hertz killer hurts 19 killer hurts" }, { "startSec": 440.7, "endSec": 464.62, "text": "so basically more than half but that's not the only tool that we have in terms of dialing up ordown fidelity high fineness to low fineness so that's sample rate we can also talk about sample sizeor bit depth bit depth that is the amplitude amplitude is intensity or volume and you can think of" }, { "startSec": 464.62, "endSec": 484.94, "text": "the wave as it crests and it falls there is a upper limit and a lower limit and it oscillatesbetween those two points so while the sample rate was the amount of samples that was creatingthe impression of a continuous wave a continuous line a curve when it's really just did" }, { "startSec": 485.42, "endSec": 494.38, "text": "straight lines in you know impersonating a curve this is the maximum and minimum amount" }, { "startSec": 495.34, "endSec": 519.82, "text": "that that wave can oscillate so it applies most for very loud sounds that's part of the reasonwhy I like to record in 32 bit float I actually think that it's harder for the human ear to hearlike slight changes in sample rate particularly when you're above 44.1 which is industry standardthat's like CD quality MP3 quality is generally there most people record higher than I recorded" }, { "startSec": 519.82, "endSec": 528.22, "text": "88 to so double but the difference between 44.1 and 88 to it's there but it's not I mean" }, { "startSec": 529.1, "endSec": 548.78, "text": "it's not nearly as pronounced to my ear at least as bit depth which is the intensity the volumewhen things are getting clipped when they're actually you know not they're getting they're runninginto a digital ceiling because they're not able to get louder that is particularly unpleasant" }, { "startSec": 549.58, "endSec": 570.38, "text": "sometimes cool but unpleasant and let me let me show you on that same track again this is likea plugin version so it's not quite as elegant or as intense as doing this in for real for real likejust recording poorly this is instead like imitating recording poorly using a lo-fi plugin" }, { "startSec": 571.18, "endSec": 595.34, "text": "but I digress let me show you it it's close enough I'll show you what it sounds like to have thatthat sample size that bit depth fall so I'm starting here at 24 bits and I am going down 1 now I'm down2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 do you hear how my voice is got like a teniness to it it's it's now it's clipping" }, { "startSec": 595.34, "endSec": 615.34, "text": "its ability to be dynamic especially if I was getting louder I'm gonna keep going here we gogoing down now I'm at 12 bits this is when you really start to hear it now I'm at half 11it gets ready for this 8 bit is dope here's 8 bit world check it check bomb bomb" }, { "startSec": 616.7, "endSec": 632.19, "text": "don't you hear how that could be cool with a snare drum the little it's cool let's go lowerso you can't understand me off I go invaders in 4 bits you can't even hear me" }, { "startSec": 634.03, "endSec": 656.75, "text": "so those are just some of our tools to degrade audio or amp up audio you know we're going theopposite direction right now but what you're hearing now is the reverse and thanks to the ability forus to sample this audio to create a continuous picture and be able to have enough dynamicinformation you're able to hear a voice that goes up and down that has complexity it actually" }, { "startSec": 656.75, "endSec": 682.43, "text": "feels you know somewhat real although it is being colored by a million different things betweenthe microphone and the conversion from analog to digital as well as different plugins and soundconditioning tools and even the compression the things that are making the audio file more digestibleto your you know internet provider all of those things influence the sound greatly but" }, { "startSec": 683.87, "endSec": 694.91, "text": "nothing quite as much as that minimum floor of bit depth and sample rateand I say all of this just to illustrate part of this medium part of like what recorded music is" }, { "startSec": 696.11, "endSec": 722.03, "text": "it's a mamesis it's a to meme it's a you know an impression it's not necessarily real but there'sbeauty in the impression there's beauty in the gaps between those dots and I think you can actuallyget a lot out of it as a listener given different points and hopefully reimagining some of this mediumbecause it's so accessible we can all record podcasts now we can all do these things and that's" }, { "startSec": 722.03, "endSec": 745.47, "text": "pretty cool we are funneling more of the human spirit and soul into the recorded world and thisis a new technology you know it's like just over a hundred years old hundred and what 130 1880sI think was the first you know very very basic bad bad bad sounding wax vinyl recording you know" }, { "startSec": 745.47, "endSec": 763.55, "text": "quasi recording which we can talk about on a different podcast but the concepts are still the sameit's I think it's just incredible how much we are pouring into it from you know mytrials and tribulations as a indie musician you know not being able to play on a bus" }, { "startSec": 764.43, "endSec": 791.47, "text": "to us discussing the nuances of sample rate and bit depth and with that I want to thank youfor listening to this podcast hopefully you'll tune in again next week I really like havingthat push and pull between guests and then these solo pods I hope you do too I'd love to hear fromyou if you have any comments or questions or things that you'd like me to cover happy to just" }, { "startSec": 791.47, "endSec": 814.43, "text": "reach out to me at scoobertdoobert.pizza scoobertdoobert.pizza and uh yeah I'll let you upand would be happy to talk about whatever it's all just music man including recording engineeringit's all just it's a different musical instrument and the fun part is like no matter what" }, { "startSec": 816.43, "endSec": 834.35, "text": "the technique or the science it's just another tool for us to mess things up to degrade audio orenhance audio it's just another musical knob and that's the beauty about learning this stuffis you find more knobs and you find more things to mess with and then you have more creative expression" }, { "startSec": 836.86, "endSec": 848.7, "text": "no matter what the emotion that you're trying to convey bit depth sample rate can play a rolethanks again for tuning in love to hear from you see you bye" } ], "correctionsApplied": [ { "id": "doobert-double-t", "count": 1, "note": "Extra trailing t on host name" }, { "id": "scoober-doober", "count": 1, "note": "Host intro name ASR typo" } ] }