Hello everyone,

I urgently need help with my iMac 400 DV SE: I'd like to record speech with a normal mic (and a PlainTalk Converter) on my iMac 400 DV SE at 8 kHz but every software I use (Cubase, SoundStudio, Peak...) says that I can't record at this sample rate.

To record at a higher rate and to sample it down afterwards is no solution because of insufficient quality compared to directly recording at 8 kHz.

Neither recording at 8 kHz with e.g. CoolEdit using VPC (and using the same inbuilt A/D converter!!) is a working solution because there are skips while recording.

I'd be very happy to solve this problem soon

PS: I need the files at this low rate for telecommunication services

you have bad quality when downsampling to 8Khz because you don't oversample enough. For complicated reasons, to downsample cleanly at low frequency you need the best signal you can get. try 44khz. Else you are just amplifying faults in the signal (if you try 11khz->8khz for example, or even 22->8)

Pick a good resampler too, linear resampling or band limited linear.

be sure to sample in 16 bits too, the conversion to ulaw/mlaw (what I suspect you want) is very easy; the codecs are even in quicktime!

to record at 8k can never give as good results as post dithering from at least 44.1 khz/16 bit.
there are SO many available solutions.
logic, metro, spark, and peak, are the obvious pro solutions, however
there are some free/shareware programs around that do what you want, including some that record at 8 bit resolution, but they all call themselves variants on "snd" editors/recorders, apple's native sound format, logic etc won't use these files anyway.
check apple's osx download site for EVERYthing currently available.
oh yeah...
buserror said it all really.