bouncing / dithering

[audio.android]

hi everyone,

I have a question about bouncing and dithering. at the moment, i record all my tracks in Live, and then bounce them to Logic for mixing/mastering. The problem i'm having is that, because i am dithering every track in Live that I bounce, I end up with a bit of noise in each of the tracks... which adds up when I put them all together in Logic.

question 1 - do i need to dither each track that i bounce from live, or can i just dither my final .wav that I bounce out of logic?

question 2 - if i have to dither each track, what would be the best for this application? which dither method introduces the least amount of noise? also, is there a dither method that most people tend to prefer?

thanks!

[hybridjosto]

I have a similar question about normalising. I'm not sure whether to do it or not - at the moment I'm just putting tracks into itunes so I can listen to them in my ipod but I've noticed that the normalisation seems to alter the sound to what I hear direct from ableton.

[audio.android]

Well, I read online somewhere that anytime you normalize you're also dithering as well, which is why it's good to only normalize once.

[Pooks]

You do not need to dither to move the files between projects, just bounce as normal and import into Logic as the daw will accept the files at any bitrate.

Normalising does not dither anything at all

Dithering is only useful to create files at a lower bit rate. For example your while project has been bounced at 24bit including the final bounce of your track. If you then want to put the track on a CD which will only accept a 16bit file you then dither the bounce for the 16bit version.

its explained nice and simply here
http://www.earlevel.com/Digital%20Audio/Dither.html

[audio.android]

Thanks for the response Pooks.

However, if this is the case, then what happens if I choose to export with the following settings:

dither ="no dithering"
bit depth = 16 bit

I would assume this would cause a problem right? What bit depth is Ableton running at?

Or more to the point... which bit depth should I choose to safely export without dithering?

[zalo]

there is no reason to reducing bitrate down to 16bit unless the next step is putting it on an audio cd

when exporting audio tracks from ableton to mix in logic render them at 32bit and what ever your working sample rate is (Live>Preferences...>Audio>Sample Rate)

when you render at a lower bit rate than your working bit rate (ableton works at 32 bit) you are forcing a lot of rounding to occur, this changes the sound

dithering adds subaudible noise to the track to create less rounding errors, when you add subaudible noise more than once it starts becoming audible noise

hope this helped

oh and normalizing is basically just gain

[audio.android]

beautiful!

thanks zalo, that was exactly the information i needed.

all hail the ableton forums!