I’ve recently upgraded my gear and got an Axe-Fx III, which operates at a fixed 48 kHz sample rate. When I open older projects that were recorded at 44.1 kHz, the project’s pitch and playback speed change.
At the moment, the only way to deal with this is to convert all audio files to 48 kHz, which is a destructive process. It also does not always work properly, since frozen tracks are not affected by the conversion, leaving the project with mismatched pitch and timing across tracks.
Adding a real-time audio resampling feature, similar to what WaveLab offers, would be extremely helpful. It would save a significant amount of time, and more importantly, would preserve the original project files without forcing destructive conversions.
So if I understand you correctly, the Axe-FX acts as your audio interface but only supports 48kHz? If that is really the case, to be honest I would direct a feature request to the Axe-FX vendor to support 44.1k. Even some cheap sub $100 USB audio interface nowadays support everything from 44.1 to 96, often even up to 192Khz…
At the same time, many DAWs already support real-time resampling. Regardless of the Axe-Fx III, if you decide to change a project’s sample rate for any reason, the same issue still applies. Even when the audio interface supports multiple sample rates, you are forced to destructively resample all audio files to preserve correct pitch and speed.
Also, asking Fractal Audio to change this is not as simple as a software update, since the sample rate is a hardware-level design choice. Thus, it makes more sense to ask Steinberg to implement this, where it can be solved via a software update, unlike the Axe-Fx.
Many guitar modellers are fixed at 48 kHz, including the Quad Cortex, which is currently one of the most popular modellers on the market. A large number of guitarists use their modellers as their audio interface for convenience and cost reasons.
So this is not really an Axe-Fx-specific problem. It’s a general workflow limitation that a real-time resampling feature would solve regardless of the interface being used. Otherwise, there would be no reason for tools like WaveLab to offer real-time sample rate conversion in the first place.