The current (up-to-date) ASIO driver for the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB audio interface offers a wide selection of sample rates from 44.1 to 192. There is a Focusrite “control panel” for setting the desired sample rate for recording.
Audacity also has a choice of sample rates for recording audio when the 2i2 is selected as the input. Which setting is the one that is used if they are not set to the same value, and what happens if they are different.
To ask this in a different way, MUST the two settings be the same?
Audacity doesn’t use ASIO drivers.* It’s using the regular Windows drivers.
The Windows drivers will automatically and “secretly” resample as required so the hardware and software always work together. (ASIO will not.)
The same thing works on the playback side… You can play a 24/192 file on a regular-old cheap soundcard. Or, you can view a high-resolution image on a lower resolution monitor, etc.
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ASIO requires a license so Audacity can’t be distributed with ASIO support. If you are a programmer you can [u]compile it with ASIO support[/u].
I assume you mean that it won’t cause a problem if I do not remove the Focusrite ASIO driver. Is that correct?
There may be other applications, such as ProTools that use it, though at this time I do not have any other suitable application for recording live music at festivals.
It’s OK to have ASIO drivers installed, provided that there are no running applications using them when you want to run Audacity. ASIO drivers, when in use, take exclusive control of the audio device, which prevents applications that don’t use ASIO from accessing the audio device.