If it works for you then stick with what works. I always had cracking
and plopping sounds when converting sample rates in Premiere.
I don't know how or why. It definitely wasn't audio card related
or anything.

Just convert your 44.1 khz tracks to 48 khz before adding them
to the rest of your project. Use whatever you like working with.
Use WAV.

The songs I initially chose were Windows Media Player recordings on my computer already, so I just converted to mp3 for file size. Sounded fine so I went with it, especially since most of the video clips included crowd sounds from the basketball game shots, so if there were any compression artifacts they were unnoticable.

I used to do the music in wav format with Cool Edit Pro before I got Premiere and when Cool Edit didn't have MP3 capability. Now that I've got both, high quality MP3 works well for me and saves on disc space, but if it was in wav format to begin with I probably wouldn't waste time converting it.

I'll try exporting to Cool Edit and converting it up to 48 KHz and see if that helps.

Thanks,
Jeff