Ableton Forum

name off a bunch of audio clip editors, i've only used bias peak, and it seems pretty cool, but has way too much stuff (and the gui is quite cluttered). it would be awesome if ableton made a simple, separate application, with multiple windows and stuff, that matched the look, key commands, ideas, etc. of live.

so just name a few, and what do you use?

thanks.

I use Sound Forge, although the free Audicity is supposedly pretty good.

PEAK here all the way, mainly because of the quality of the dither and sample rate converting.
and since 5 it's not such a buggy bastard anymore, but i actually don't care, the dither and sample rate converting quality alone is worth it.

hey subfunk....any chance you could post an mp3 (or two?) showing the difference between dithering ?

something recorded at a high sample rate initially then peakdithered.mp3, and livedithered.mp3 ....or whatever is handy...

I would really appreciate it...

I don't believe Live does any dithering.

well...if you take a 24 bit 96hz wav file, put it in a clip in live, then render to a 16bit 44.1hz wav file ...isnt that dithering essentially ?

DSP QUATRO

splashmas wrote:

I don't believe Live does any dithering.

bounce wrote:

well...if you take a 24 bit 96hz wav file, put it in a clip in live, then render to a 16bit 44.1hz wav file ...isnt that dithering essentially ?

no, not really live doesn't dither it just can downsample, like in peak you can dither or downsample, a dither does partly the same but introduces (similar to converting into a mp3) a psychoaccustic 'effect / enhancement' to make up for the loss of quality during downsampling. and there is where you have up to fairly big differences in the quality of dithers doing that.

ok thanks for the info..<makes mental note>

so could you post an example of peaks dither in action, compared to downsampling in live ?

?!?!
!

hey bounce, basically yes... but you have to be patient, as i never record anything higher then 44.1 / 16bit. yes i know. i am a hardcore freak about sound. contradiction? hey! but i have several reasons not to record any higher than that, regarding my own stuff.

and the material of clients, which is obviously recorded higher and better, i can't give out, not even as a sample. so i have to record something first in say 48 khz / 96khz 24bit and dither with pow-r 1/2/3 (all of 'em) and also downsampling in live) so stay tuned!

Basically, dithering adds low frequency noise. As a result the edges aren't so "jagged" when you downsample.

Eg the "dither" on waves L2 doesn't downsample for you - it just adds the dithering noise.

If you want to do a little experiment do one export with dithering, one without and mix one into the other with inverted phase. Normalise and you'll end up with the dithering noise (turn your speakers down though!!!! IT WILL BE LOUD!)

Dithering fools you ears into making 16 bits sound like 24.