[Rwp] rendering again

Mon Oct 19 23:33:20 EDT 2015

I was speaking of rendered or printed fx to a file.

yes, if you still have the project, it would make sense to go back to 
the project and get it straight from the source.

We can't do anything about media we get from other sources, already 
processed at 16 bit, and 24 bit audio is indeed very wide and not likely 
to have audible artifacts from processing.
at the normal levels we will use them.

I'm talking about best practices for maintaining the best audio quality 
in house though.

Internally with in your reaper projects.

When you glue, or render, and create a 24 bit file, that is coming from 
a 64 bit wide file, then you are technically throwing away resolution.
Could you hear it?
Probably not.
You might not even hear it most of the time if you rendered 16 bit 
unless you turned it way up and caught a grainy tail or something.
But it's the principal of conservation,
of data,
you can't get the data back once it's gone, kind of like making an mp3 
from a wav and then getting the wav back,
not quite as bad, but once you go from a 64 bit file to a 24 bit file,
say you glued a bunch of stuff and then wanted to use it in the same 
project again, then it returns back to the 64 bit environment.
from a lower bit depth.

If you glue at 64 bits, you maintain the same wideness of data path.

That's what I'm getting at.

24 bits is probably wide enough at any rate though, for most work, 
especially if you only go through the process one time, and don't keep 
going back and forth,
but my concern was that there was no dither option in reaper when you 
down size like this,
when you go from bigger to smaller, you should always dither which takes 
care of the potential for truncated data, so you don't get ragged edges.

24 bit is huge, and 64 bit is even
more so,
noise floors will be something like 135 140 db down,
and I don't even know what they'd be for a 64 bit file, nothing our 
systems could produce for sure,
but I was jus thinking since there is no dither internally that I know 
of keeping things the same till the last dither might be the safest, 
speaking strictly from a technical point of view.
But 24 bit rendering is not at all a bad compromise, and I would have to 
do some testing with some long tails to see if I could hear anything.

On 10/19/2015 3:00 AM, Justin Macleod via RWP wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I’m slightly confused.
>
> You said:
>
> 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 why would we do that? If you needed the file again, why would you 
> not just open the project with it in and copy the audio across? Then 
> you would have the 64-bit version. I totally see the need when gluing 
> items and freezing tracks, but rendering out everything at 64 bit 
> float when you have the projects anyway strikes me as being 
> exceedingly hard-drive space intensive.
>
> Plus, how is using 24-bit files that you’ve have rendered out from 
> previous projects any different from a DJ mixing with 16-bit CD tracks 
> for mix tapes or film production houses using 24-bit sound effects and 
> royalty free music. If you use any third-party media at all in your 
> projects, from sample libraries etc, you’re going to be taking the 
> same quality hit as compared to a 64 bit version of the same file.
>
> Sorry if I’m being dense and have missed something,
>
> Justin
>
> *From:*RWP [mailto:rwp-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] *On Behalf Of *Tayeb 
> Meftah via RWP
> *Sent:* 19 October 2015 08:14
> *To:* Reapers Without Peepers <rwp at bluegrasspals.com>
> *Cc:* Tayeb Meftah <tayeb.meftah at gmail.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [Rwp] rendering again
>
> HELLO Chris
>
> out of subject question
>
> i wonder are you a blind person?
>
> or a sighted person helping here?
>
> thank
>
>
> Envoyé de mon iPad
>
>
> Le 19 oct. 2015 à 05:56, Chris Belle via RWP <rwp at bluegrasspals.com 
> <mailto:rwp at bluegrasspals.com>> a écrit :
>
>     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?
>
>
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