The most common mistake in the field
44.1 kHz is not a pitch
“How do I set my sound card to 432 Hz?” — you don’t. The number on your sound card and the concert pitch of your music are two different things that happen to share a unit. That explains more forum questions than anything else in this subject.
Sample rate
44 100 Hz
How often the sound was measured — 44,100 snapshots per second. A property of the recording, not of the music. It says nothing about how high or low anything sounds.
Concert pitch
432 Hz
How fast the air vibrates — at one particular note, the A above middle C. A property of the music. It says nothing about how finely anything was recorded.
A film has 24 frames per second. How fast the actor walks is another matter entirely.
The questions that follow from this
Can I set my sound card to 432 Hz?
No — the setting you find there is something else. Sound cards know 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 96 kHz and similar values. Those are sample rates. 432 would not be a valid entry there, and even if you could type it in, no 432 Hz concert pitch would come of it — only an unusable recording.
What you are actually after is done by a program that sits between the music and the speaker and shifts the pitch. That is exactly what the IYAMBAE Tuner is.
How do I convert a song from 44,100 kHz to 432 Hz?
The question stands in that form in dozens of forums, and it cannot be answered, because it puts together two quantities that have nothing to do with each other. The sample rate stays where it is. What changes is the pitch of the content — from 440 (or wherever the recording really sits) to 432. That is 1.8 per cent lower, or 31.8 cents.
But if I change the sample rate, it does sound lower?
Yes — and that is exactly the confusion that keeps the error alive. If you play a file recorded at 44,100 back at 43,309, it sounds lower. But it also runs slower: a four-minute piece suddenly takes four minutes and four seconds.
It is still a clean route, if that is what you want: not a single number is recalculated, only a different rate is written into the file header. Bit-exact, without any loss — paid for with the tempo. Anyone who wants to keep the tempo cannot avoid the fact that something has to be computed.
Does the music lose quality when it is retuned?
With lossless material — FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC — the sound is recalculated once and then stored losslessly again. No second compression step, no stacking of artefacts.
With MP3 or AAC it is different: what has already been heavily compressed would have to be compressed a second time when written back. That is why lossless source material is not a nicety here, it is the difference.
And what about “my track is in 432 Hz”?
Strictly speaking that is off as well, but it is a useful shorthand. A piece of music does not have one frequency — it has many, at once, constantly changing. What is meant is always the reference note: if the A above middle C sits at 432 Hz, every other note sits accordingly. A tuning is a grid, not a single note.
Which number means what
| Number | where it turns up | what it means |
|---|---|---|
| 44 100 Hz | CD, most files | measurements per second |
| 48 000 Hz | film, video, many devices | measurements per second |
| 16 Bit | CD | fineness of each single measurement |
| 320 kbit/s | MP3 | amount of data per second after compression |
| 432 Hz | tuning | vibration of the reference note A |
| 440 Hz | tuning, ISO 16 standard | the same, a different value |
The first four rows describe the file. The last two describe the music. That both are measured in hertz is the whole reason for the confusion.
Do you want to know where your music actually sits?
Drag a file into the window — the measuring tool tells you the concert pitch in a few seconds. Free, in the browser, nothing is uploaded.