[Rwp] rendering again

[Chris Belle]

Been reading the manual and playing with reapers different options for 
rendering and bit depth and dithering and such.


I noticed, when you consolidate or export tracks,
  there is no option for dither there.

When you render to a bigger bit depth than you are recording,
the extra bits are padded with zeros theoretically, but when you go the 
other way, you want something to fix up those rounding errors, or ragged 
tails you might have on the ends.
way down low.

You'd never hear it probably with any modern mix hugging the top end of 
the scale, but sonar has dithering options all through the architecture,
you can set dither for triangular or rectangular, or pow r 3, or turn it 
off is you want, but the only place I find it in reaper is a single 
noise shaping option and dither option for rendering.

so because of that reason, I wonder if maybe best practice in reaper is 
to set everything the same across the board the same until you are going 
to do your final render.

In other words, since reaper defaults to 64 bit mixing resolution
then maybe we should render to 64 bit floating point.
Sonar's rendering is set to 32 floating point by default,
and there is a check box to check and uncheck the 64 bit double 
precission processing engine, which probably equates to reapers 64 bit 
internal mixing depth,
so considering our plug-ins generally process at 32 or 64 bit
if we render out at 24 bit and then brin the file back in for further 
use, then we theoretically might be throwing away some resolution.

But leaving everything at 32 or 64 bit, and leaving any shaving down of 
the file till the very last would guarantee never to introduce rounding 
errors to the process.
The way it is now, if we ever need to use the consolidate options or the 
batch file processing, and we choose a lower bit rate, than what the 
files are in at present, then
I seriously wonder if reaper does just truncate those extra bits.
Also I wonder even when dithering down when we use the render option 
which does give us that single dither and noise shaping options,
even when we are rendering to 24 bit, if we are coming from a 32 or 64 
bit environment,
if we should go ahead and turn on dither.
Reaper also has some interesting features that you can't do in sonar, 
like reducing the mixing latency down to even 8 bits if you like.

And some things I've never seen like 39 bit and 12 bit.

Which makes me think that maybe if you want to do straight recording, 
and never dither at all, for something casual, where processing has 
already been applied,
oh, for instance a radio show marathon that went on for a weekend, and 
you wanted to just go off and leave it and then come back and if you 
didn't do any volume changes, or any processes inside reaper involving 
plugs, or gain staging and such, since technically with a DAW, or you 
don't change a fader anywhere then what you put in should be the same as 
what you get out,
then I wonder if lowering the mixing resolution down to the file format 
you want, say 16 bit or 24 bit, I wonder if that makes any sense?