[Rwp] rendering again

[Chris Belle]

Just to put a little  more butter on the bread,
about this ever so contravertial topic,
so tp speak, sonar renders everything at 32 bit floating point if you 
leave things at default.

So when you freeze, or bounce anything, you get a 32 bit file internally.
Many players, and some other DAW's can't handle this format so I guess 
that may be one reason reaper defaults
to 24 bit bounces, they call it glue, but it amounts to just about the 
same thing.
making a new file processed from other files.

Ideally, when you do this, you want to do it to the same size file, or 
one bigger which will ensure you retain the information you had, when 
using a bigger file, the extra bites usually get padded with zeros.
Sonar has dithering options in this rendering  bouncing process,
in case you do decide to use a smaller bounce size, so you can take care 
of those tails, but reaper does not.

Not obviously on the surface anyway,
so that's why I was thinking of doing all my internal bounces at 64 bit 
and only going down to 24 or 16 bitg when I was finished with the projec.
Most people I know using sonar in a high end situation turn everything 
up to 64 bit, as well as checking the box for the 64 bit double 
precission engine.

Whether this makes any detectable difference for most situations is 
anybody's guess or conjecture, but I do know if you do this, rounding 
errors become so very negligible.
and so far out there that it's not really a consideration anymore.

 From what I gather, anything above 32 bit is good,
and this is because most plugs we use process at either 32 bit or 64 bit 
floating point.

So having this mixing bit depth  internally guarantees that everything 
get's translated, more or less.

And different pieces of hardware like the behringer board have their own 
bit depth when processing, for the behringer, it's 40 bit.

Of course, it doesn't make sense to try and use big files outside our DAW's,
many times I get only white noise when experimentally trying to play say 
a 32 bit floating point file in winamp, and a 64 won't even get started, 
I get a system error.

But when having a conversation with my mentor Jim Roseberry over at 
studiocat.com,
who builds the finest DAW's in the land,
and is an endless wealth of patient knowledge when I've been building my 
own machines, or helping others,
trying to figure out the best ways to do things, he says that 64 bit 
processing on our modern systems doesn't
hit them much harder, and it insures the best possible resolution for 
all the things we might do, cuts out those rounding errors,
and I think there is probably something to that.

The only time I might ignore this rule is if I were just recording 
something with no processing,
no plugs, just wanted a straight bounce of what I recorded  in to
straight out.

At that point, then any 64 bit
wide bus or even 32 would probably be wasted,
since you're not going to do any mixing.

I would be curious to hear from others if anyone has ever used any of 
the more unusual bit depth options in the advanced reaper tab, like 12 
bit or even 8 bit.

Probably be kind of cool for some low fi sort of electronic thing,
though there are probably better ways to do that with things like bit 
reduction plugs, like some of the j s stuf,
but I wonder what the thinking was to even include them in reaper?

Sonar doesn't have such a thing, only the check box for the 64 bit 
double precission engine thing,
but nothing for mixing bit depth as such,
but it does have the extra options dither and such for rendering both 
for internal
use, and for export, anyway, these are two entirely different animals.

On 10/19/2015 10:33 PM, Chris Belle wrote:
> 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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