Final mix bounce

I've heard some mention of bouncing all tracks down to one track to inspect your final mix before coping to a cd or posting it for review. When bouncing, a window pops up with various choices to select. This is where I get confused......


1) Do I want to bounce the master bus , all busses , or all tracks?
2) Do I want to export the master bus , all busses , or all tracks to be burnt onto a cd?
3) What is...And how should I set the dithering?

I thought I had a pretty good mix, so I bounced all tracks (what you hear) to an audio track and my vocal track seemed louder than the unbounced mix. I think the dithering was set to triangular.

I feel that I am lacking knoweledge in this department so I felt the need to take it up with the board.
Thanks, Ken

I don't "bounce" the tracks for that purpose. When I want to listen to my mix...outside of MC, I export it using WHAT YOU HEAR as the preset. I open it with my wave editor and take a listen that way. If I like it...I move forward, if not I go back to MC and remix the problems.

John.... good to see you again...

Dithering.... isn't that what dirty old men do?......

And come on.... triangle.... a 3 sided geometric shape and a rectangle...a 4 sided geometric shape where the opposite sides are parallel and one set of sides is longer than the other set of sides.... or something like that....

Can't you tell it's a slow day around here?

Broadcast Wave basically just allows one to add metadata to the file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Wave_Format

RIFF wave is the "old standby" and the standard.

if you export as a Broadcast wave from MC you'd never know the difference (and neither would anyone else) from a RIFF wave - so it really doesn't matter which one you use, but you're not getting the benefit of the REASON for using Broadcast unless you have an editor which will insert that metadata to your song after export.

as far as 24bit and 16bit - you should always be recording in 16bit (excpetions: someone who uses MIDI only and the sampler synth they use doesn't have 24bit samples). 24bit gives you more flexibility and allows you to record at lower levels with higher resolution which in turn makes it easier to mix.

dithering is ONLY necessary if your project is in 24bit and you are going to export to a wave file (or even an mp3) for listening to on a CD player, your computer in WMP or whatever. the wave file needs to be exported at 16bit/44100Hz for the standard player to be able to play it. In a nutshell, dithering is:
In an analog system, the signal is continuous, but in a PCM digital system, the amplitude of the signal out of the digital system is limited to one of a set of fixed values or numbers. This process is called quantization. Each coded value is a discrete step... if a signal is quantized without using dither, there will be quantization distortion related to the original input signal... In order to prevent this, the signal is "dithered", a process that mathematically removes the harmonics or other highly undesirable distortions entirely, and that replaces it with a constant, fixed noise level.
without dithering you can get errors with undesirable artifacts in your wave export. with dithering it helps to eliminate the artifacts.

the different types, triangular, rectangular, POWR-3 (sonar exclusive), etc, are simply different algorithms used to apply the dither. sometimes one dither might work better than others, but as a general rule you use the 'best' one available to you.

And...or...have nothing useful to contribute to this conversation.

Beagle: many thanks for the details of RIFF verses Broadcast, and 24-bit vs. 16-bit. Since my final goal is to produce music CD's, that's why I'll stick with 16-bit (and I rarely if ever produce MIDI-only recording). So that's also why I don't have to select the dithering Triangle OR Rectangle option, is that if you start in 16-bit mode, no dithering is necessary. Cool ! K.I.S.S. works very well for me!

Oh! Beagle thanks for clarifying that, I really was wondering what all of the hype would have been about if 24-bit was wasted on the CD-quality creation process. While I knew that 16-bit 44Khz was the audio CD standard, I was puzzled at why we then should record in 24-bit. But this makes sense then - and I'll plan then on switching over begnning with my next song project. Better resolution, and better mix, is well worth pursuing!! -John

ken - you can set the default to be 24bit as long as your soundcard supports it.

OPTIONS>AUDIO>AUDIO DRIVER BIT DEPTH = 24

ooopps - yeah, that was a typo!

ORIGINAL: 57Gregy

it won't let me change the bit rate; it's grayed out. Probably because it's been at 16 bit since day 1, but I think I could change it by reverting to WDM, selecting 24 bit and going back to ASIO.

I have the same issue. I think I will try that as well. Thanks Greg,

no, not sure who said that, but the bit rate does matter in asio.

and I'm not sure why your not able to change to 24 bit in asio unless your asio drivers are not written to allow it. if that's the case then I'd use WDM. there's nothing that says ASIO is better than WDM - it has advantages like it won't let you use your onboard soundcard at the same time which helps a lot of people who don't disable their onboard soundcard because that way they can't have both running in MC, but if the WDM drivers are written just as fast as the ASIO then there's no other real advantage to using ASIO over WDM.

post us some screen shots, Ken. the UX1 is capable of 24bit so we should try to figure out what's going on.

also- look at those screens in a BRAND NEW PROJECT, not one you've been working on.

It does say 24 bit at the bottom of my screen but the bit rate selector is gray @ 16 bit.

Well, Reece, all my current projects are at 16-bit, so I will try to change it the next time I start a new song. The grayed-out setting reads 24-bit, although at the bottom of the screen it reads 16-bit. Also the clip properties of selected clips reads 16-bit.



I read the entire Focusrite user guide last night and found no reference to the bit rate not mattering in ASIO, also searched the MC Pro 24 and SHS 6 help files for ASIO, bit depth, sampling rate and found no reference there, either. Funny, though, that in the MC P 24 help it states that MC will only work in 16-bit, but MC P 24 was specifically made to work in 24-bit, hence the name. Another example of insufficient help file editing.
Maybe I was dreaming.