[RedSmurf]

Originally Posted by Barney

Probably a simple answer to this & I should just Google the question; but when importing CDs with i-tunes you get the option to chose the 'Sample Rate' (whatever that is??) and the ranges are 8 kHz up to 48kHz ('auto' is set as the default, which must be 44.1kHz looking at what all of my previously imported CDs are). Not sure if I should just be using the i-tunes default setting for this as this is 128KBPS for the bit-rate. Any words of wisdom on this (hoping the answer is just don't worry about it).

Sample rate is the amount of digital audio samples taken per second. For CD audio, that's 44.1kHz, which allows to reproduce sounds up to 22.05kHz (the maximum frequency for a given sample rate is always half the sample rate, according to Nyquist's theorem). There is no point in changing the sample rate while ripping CDs, so just leave it at 'Auto', which will always use the same sample rate as the original source.

Some people are tempted to upsample the audio to 48kHz (the rate traditionally used in 'professional' audio equipment), but that's pointless. Likewise to transcoding to a higher bitrate, you won't gain any audio quality by doing that, on the contrary. Resampling digital audio correctly, especially between those two sampling rates, is difficult and will degrade the audio if not done properly.