Concerning High-Quality mode

Laura_Live · Post by **Laura_Live** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:53 pm

When rendering a track, are the clips being rendered in high quality even if the option is not individually selected for the clip?

Thank you
Laura

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 2:23 pm

No, you have to activate that mode if you want Live to use it when rendering.

locojohn · Post by **locojohn** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 5:06 pm

Tarekith wrote:No, you have to activate that mode if you want Live to use it when rendering.

Actually, in my opinion, there should be a setting whether to turn High Quality mode on when rendering. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Andrejs

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 5:41 pm

I thik the downside of that is that just because something is labelled 'high quality' doesn't mean it will always sound better. The point of high quality in Live is to reduce aliasing when transposing samples upwards. But aliasing isn't always a bad thing, it's used a lot in sound design, so by having it off in your project, but on when rendering could lead to a situation where your render sounds a lot different than what you were doing when working in the project. By making it a global command, what you hear when working on the project will always be what you hear when you render.

If you're not transposing samples up in Live, then the high quality setting doesn't have any effect at all and you can ignore it anyway.

crumhorn · Post by **crumhorn** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:59 am

Tarekith wrote:I thik the downside of that is that just because something is labelled 'high quality' doesn't mean it will always sound better. The point of high quality in Live is to reduce aliasing when transposing samples upwards. But aliasing isn't always a bad thing, it's used a lot in sound design, so by having it off in your project, but on when rendering could lead to a situation where your render sounds a lot different than what you were doing when working in the project. By making it a global command, what you hear when working on the project will always be what you hear when you render.

If you're not transposing samples up in Live, then the high quality setting doesn't have any effect at all and you can ignore it anyway.

There is a similar problem with some VST plugins that have an off line rendering mode. Ivory Piano is one example. I got a bit carried away jamming along to my track with loads of sustain pedal, but it sounds OK because the polyphony is set to 16. Then when you render Ivory switches to off line mode which always allows unlimited polyphony. Result = mud.

It would be handy to have an option in live that could disable this behaviour.

anachroschism · Post by **anachroschism** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 9:10 am

interesting info. so should I be less concerned about using hi_q mode, Its pretty much always on, especially if im warping something to hell.

very little warping or just snagging loops of other audio, should I keep Hiq off?

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 2:07 pm

You can keep it on if you want, the main point is that if you're not trasposing things up, it's not doing anything. It's not using more CPU either in this case, so there's really no harm in leaving it on if you want.

barstu · Post by **barstu** » Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:42 pm

Would this be the same for things like HQ mode in EQ8, reverb, flange & saturator? Would I have to select them in order for the render to be higher quality?

Finally does the buffer size in the audio tab effect the render process?

nathannn · Post by **nathannn** » Fri Jan 27, 2012 3:48 am

they should have a high quality and separate anti aliasing button, why are they purposely trying to confuse us?

dag451 · Post by **dag451** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:52 pm

Does anybody know what sample rate the high-quality mode is oversampling to?

2x?

[edit] finally found my answer from Thavius Beck's 'Did you know?' post at Dubspot:

When Hi-Quality mode is enabled on the EQ8, the audio being fed into the EQ is oversampled by a factor of 2 (meaning the sample rate of the audio is doubled. If your session’s sample rate is 44.1kHz, enabling Hi-Quality will make the audio being fed into the EQ8 88.2kHz). Then the EQ changes are calculated at the doubled sample rate, and finally the audio as it leaves the EQ is undersampled by a factor of 2, or basically brought back to it’s original sample rate.

It's worth reading the whole post, there are some comments from Matt Jackson on the subject.

Is it safe to assume this is across the board then? That Live uses oversampling by a factor of 2 for all Hi-Q modes?

Is that right?

Also, if you are working with audio files at a high rate like 96kHz, does that make the Hi-Q mode a little pointless?

I will do some listening tests on this very soon.

omutumo · Post by **omutumo** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:36 pm

IIRC EQ8's low and high cut slopes are steeper in HQ mode.

I don't like using EQ8 in HQ mode, don't think it sounds any better and you get really weird phase problems for some reason. It's been discussed on here before but try racking 2 EQ8's in parallel, set one to HQ and one normal.

3dot... · Post by **3dot...** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:44 pm

omutumo wrote:IIRC EQ8's low and high cut slopes are steeper in HQ mode.

I don't like using EQ8 in HQ mode, don't think it sounds any better and you get really weird phase problems for some reason. It's been discussed on here before but try racking 2 EQ8's in parallel, set one to HQ and one normal.

plus it adds (uncompensated) delay...

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