The Gear
Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 3.0 (I haven't upgraded because I never needed to)
2 Delta 1010 Soundcards
2 Mytek ADC96 analog to digital converters
1 Mytek DAC96 digital to analog converters

The Situation

I took my not so portable recording rig to record a band in a big room. When it was over, I had to rush to get my my studio setup for band that was coming in the next day. I busted my tail and got everything hooked up and tested and I thought I was ready to roll.

The band called Moodminder recorded 12 songs in 2 days. We worked quickly, but the tracking turned out pretty well. The next day a singer from a different band called Fists of Phoenix came in to do overdubs for project. We were getting all sorts of glitches and errors and it sounded terrible. The sound was very thin and very distorted in a digital kind of way. I had never encountered this before. It turns out that my Master Wordclock (fed by one of my Mytek ADC96s) was set to 48Khz. It appears that there was a major problem trying to playback the 44.1Khz files from the previous Fists of Phoenix sessions with a master clock set at 48Khz. When I found the problem, I switched the sample rate on the Mytek converter back to 44.1Khz. This solved my problem with the Fists of Phoenix sessions and we were back on track.

A week or so later I fired up the Moodminder session which were tracked entirely at 48Khz (based on what the converter said), but the Vegas session identified the files as being 44.1Khz probably because I used the default settings for the session (which are normally 44.1Khz). When I played the Moodminder files with the clock set to 44.1, the sound was very slow and pitch shifted down. However, when I switched my clock to 48Khz, the sound was fine.

I was able to mix a tune as I always have. However, when I rendered the song down, that file ended up being too slow and pitch shifted as well.

The Solution

It turns out that the setting of the sample rate in Vegas is used only to tag each audio file with the proper header. When I recorded at 48Khz as my masterclock, I had essentially mislabeled them in Vegas. There are programs out there that allow you to relabel audio files that were recorded in this way. It turns out that Vegas made the solution very easy.

All I had to do was the change the session from 44.1 to 48Khz and make sure that my clock was set to 48K.