What Does Sampling Rate Mean?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to tell you what sampling rate means. A sampling rate is basically a term that's used in digital recording that describes how often and how much data is used basically in a sound recording on a computer to define the sound that's going through that computer. The higher the sampling rate, the higher the quality of the sound, but also the larger the file size. Now, I'm going to show you a program here called Audacity, which is a recording program and I'm going to show you in Audacity when you're doing your own type of recordings how to choose a sampling rate for recording. Let's click on the start button and I have it installed. You can go to Google and just do a search for Audacity and you can find where to download it and install it. Now, when I'm recording here, as I'm recording, if you look down at the very bottom here where my mouse cursor is, there's a project rate. And it's currently set forty four thousand one hundred hertz. Now that is my sampling rate and as you can see as it's recording it's getting a little wave forms here basically that describe the sound going into the microphone and that forty four thousand one hundred describes how often it samples, or pulls data from the microphone and adds it into this wave form. Now, if I were to record a project at eight thousand hertz, I'll get considerably less data going through my... going into the program. So it's saving considerably less data which will result in a smaller file size, but the quality will be a whole lot worse using eight thousand than if I'd used forty four thousand or even higher. So that's one of the trade-offs when you're choosing a sampling rate for your recording. My name's Dave Andrews and I've just defined sampling rate for you."