It doesn't hurt to communicate and ask, though. If you are collaborating on a project or sending your work out to a mastering house, communicate! If you're working in a 24-bit format and you're going to be delivering to a mastering studio, they will likely dither when they finalize the project to deliver it to you in 16-bit. Pro tools includes it as a plug-in that you can place on your master fader track. Most DAW programs have a dithering option that you can engage upon export. Even if you had a 16-bit workflow, it couldn't hurt to dither just in case someone sent you a 24-bit sample/track (it's so transparent these days-so many DAWs do the conversion on the fly and you'd never know!). You should definitely dither if you were recording in 24-bit (for the extra bandwidth) and have to deliver in 16-bit (for CD/MP3). When should I Dither?ĭithering is pretty simple to do, just pick an algorithm and go to town! However, there are many plug-ins, virtual instruments and effects that are capable of working in 24-bit resolution even if your sequence is in 16-bit-so it's something you're going to want to be aware of even if you are working in 16-bit end to end. Generally, you'll only hear this when you are mixing down from a 24-bit file to a 16-bit one. The 'edges' of your sound can be a bit fuzzy and distortion happens at the upper frequencies a bit quicker. You'll hear quantization errors most in classical music, jazz music, acoustic music or just about anything that has soft passages with large dynamic range, and you can also hear them more clearly during fade-ins and fade-outs. Effects, compression, pumping vocals, thunderous bass and bashing drums all do a good job of masking the distortion that happens when you reduce bit rates and start to add in quantization noise. ![]() In modern commercial music, hearing quantization noise (the sound of the errors you get when reducing from 24-bit to 16-bit resolution) can be difficult, because it is masked by all of the 'stuff' we love to layer into our mixes. The result is we trade off some weird, angular sounding harmonics for something that is closer to the original sound, but with a teensy bit of (hopefully unnoticeable) noise. Between points A and D, a dithering plug-in or process will interject some white noise (random noise) which will 'smooth out' that straight line. The space between point A and D used to have a little bit of fluctuation in it, and now it's a straight line from A to D. How Can We Fix It?Īll right, so we know when we move from 24-bit to 16-bit resolution we are now trying to get the same sound wave with less 'points on the graph' to represent it. Where the sound was at points B and C is no longer concrete, the computer plots a trajectory between A and D and the stuff that used to exist at points B and C is now approximated. We used to be able to represent a waveform with points A, B, C and D, but now we just have points A and D. This reduction, or 'shift' of audio data is referred to as quantization. You have less points to graph the same amount of data, so you can imagine that your nice smooth waveform becomes more angular in nature. ![]() This is a simplified illustration of the same thing that happens when you move from 24-bit audio to 16-bit audio. ![]() The result is a shape which resembles a curve, but has a lot more angular points to it. Trying to get the same data as the original waveform is impossible with 10 less points, so I have to settle for 'as good as I can get'. This results in a much more 'blocky' appearance. I've only allowed myself 8 points to 'graph' the waveform.
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