setting A/D sampling rates?

Hello everyone this is my first post and I apologize if it's in the wrong forum. I'm an EET major and am in my second year of college. I'm currently working on a project where I will be sampling audio hopefully with an arduino. I'm having some trouble finding out the maximum sampling rate of the aruino. I've read that it's max sampling rate it 77Khz and have also read that 44100Khz is out of the question. Also how does one go about setting the samping rate? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks ;D

Arduino is not very well suited for audio stuff.

Some people have succesfully implemented lofi audio stuff with Arduino, but the severly limited memory makes it a poor choice for serious audio applications.

There is an article on various techniques for handling sound on the arduino here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210308142542/http://www.uchobby.com/index.php/2007/11/11/arduino-sound-part-1/
Although the arduino sampling rate wont handle cd quality music, you should be able to do some interesting stuff with speech quality sound.

thanks for the input!

http://interface.khm.de/index.php/labor/experimente/arduino-realtime-audio-processing/

Is a good introduction to real time audio processing on an Arduino.