I’ve been using Audacity to record some items via line in, and just noticed the “Actual Rate” item in the lower right. 
After reading some other posts about it, want to make sure I understand: If project rate is 96kHz, source file is 96kHz, and actual rate (when recording) is 48kHz, is this reflecting a limitation of the sound card?
Line-in is set in Windows to 96kHz, so … all I can think of is weak sound card. Thanks
Sound card, such as it is, is Realtek Audio, so … nothing special.
I’ll give a non-Windows example (as I use Linux) to illustrate what is happening.
On Linux, one of the available audio systems is called “Jack”. It is a high performance audio server, a bit like ASIO on Windows. Like ASIO, the Jack audio server is locked to a specific sample rate, which must be a sample rate that is supported by the sound card as Jack deliberately does not provide resampling.
If I run Jack with a sample rate of 44100 Hz, and record in Audacity at 48000 Hz, Audacity will receive audio data from Jack at a rate of 44100 samples per second, because that is the rate that Jack is serving samples. Audacity is able to convert that data to 48000 samples per second, so the recorded track has a sample rate of 48000 samples per second, but during recording, I will see that Audacity (correctly) reports that the actual sample rate of the audio that it is receiving is 44100.
It is indicating the sample rate that the Windows sound system is serving audio data. This could be due to Windows sound system settings, audio device driver limitations, audio hardware limitations, or any combination of factors. It can be quite difficult to workout exactly what the Windows sound system is doing and why, as Windows tends to hide much of the details from users.
The sound system settings that are accessible to Windows users can be found in the Windows Sound control panel (See: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/windows_accessing_the_windows_sound_controls.html)
I found the issue and now have the “actual rate” I want. Thanks.
Well done. Did you have to set it somewhere in the Windows Sound control panel?
Yes, I had apparently disabled something on the soundcard. It seems. But re-enabling got it back to the desired actual rate.