Feature request: "No sample conversion" check box

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

It would be nice to be able to force Audacity to record whatever the sound card captured in its original format to avoid sample rate conversion and data format changes. The default values (or project values) can still be used to set the sound card up, but the user is able to figure out what sampling rate and format the sound card driver and hardware actually decided to use. This is especially useful for recordings that are going to be analyzed by a computer, rather than listened to by a human. Examples include sound location and separation estimated by microphone arrays, and human speech and animal vocalization recognition.

One way to do this for the sample rate:
In Edit>Preferences>Quality
under “Real-time Conversion” please add the option “None” to the “Sample Rate Converter” drop down menu.

Another way to do this for both sample rate and format is to
In Edit>Preferences>Quality
put a check box “Do not convert sound card outputs”

Thanks

2

I don’t believe the project rate converts sample data at all. Rather, it requests the sound card to record in the sample rate you have selected, and if it can’t do that, you’ll get an error -9997 or similar.

3

That isn’t possible because many computer sound systems support multiple sample rates and simply provide samples at the requested rate, so applications don’t know what sample rate the A/D converter is actually running at.

Some computer sound systems do enforce audio capture at the sound card capture rate, such as Jack Audio System (Linux) and ASIO (Windows). In these cases the application must request audio at the sample rate of the sound server (Jack / ASIO) or there’s an error (most likely “error -9997”).