I am using an Arduino Mega 2560.
I have audio coming out of my speakers and it just sounds slow and jumbled.
I am using an SD card reader wired into pins 50-53 and the speakers connected to pin 46 as I have found to be necessary.
The audio files were converted to wav files with 8 bits 16000Hz mono and unassigned 8 bit
I used this website as a reference for most things.
Am I strictly limited to 8 bits, and could I possibly change the sampling rate?
I’ve used everything in the site as it says to, but the audio quality is terrible. I can get different audio files to play, but I can’t make out the words that I am hearing.
That sounds like the audio quality is much worse than I would expect. What happens when you play the 8 bit .wav file on your laptop or desktop with decent software, like Audacity, using decent headphones or speakers?
If the sound is garbled then probably the conversion of the audio file to the correct target format has failed. Also possible is an incorrect configuration of the player. The "Instructable" shows a Uno and you are using a Mega. The timers will be different.