Platinum Version - Loops?

Hey D7, I wanted to know if the Platinum Loops were new as well??? Thanks for posting this.

Drone7
Gonna try and kill several birds here with one stone LOL (genuine questions). I'm ready to jump into Sonar Land, however, i just have  some questions...
 
 
The Loop packs exclusive to Platinum. Have these just been added recently? I don't recall seeing these as part of the original release.

 
Same loops as SONAR Producer, far as I can tell.
 

And, Craig, if you're reading this. Do you know if these sets of Loops ('all three' of the separate packs) are uncompressed, and are they 16 or 24 bit?

 
Haven't checked out every one, but they're mostly (all?) REX format files. REX files do use "data compression," but it's more like FLAC in the sense that it doesn't mess with the audio. I'm guessing the way it works is it treats silence as a single instruction (e.g., "play X amount of silence") instead of continuous audio, because if a REX file has no silence it's pretty much the same file size as a WAV file, but if there is lots of silence, it's a much smaller file.
 
I don't know if they're 16- or 24-bit, but in my experience it doesn't matter a lot because so few samples cover more than 96 dB of dynamic range. With my loop libraries I will do 24-bit sometimes, but with most (not all) source material, 16 bits does the job and of course, has the advantage of taking up less memory. For example if doing power chords, 16 bits is enough because the noise will start to kick in at -40 dB or whatever. but if you're recording hand percussion in an acoustic space, then it's worth recording at 24 bits and in that case, you might as well carry that resolution down the chain. I think some sample libraries do 24-bit samples so they can say "600 MB of samples" instead of "400 MB of samples." :)
 

Drone7
 Why don't sample producers and DAW makers just bite the bullet and get-on with it, move onward and upwards and lets put the whole 16bit era behind us.
 
 

Because:
 
1) Getting sample producers and DAW makers to agree on anything is a challenge.  Not everyone agrees q6 bit era is behind us. I have walked into studios (admittedly not the cream of the crop variety) that default to 44/16 still. I see samples for sale that are still 16 bit.
2) I would guess that if Cakewalk were interested in updating file format they would not have simply used the same samples that were included in the last 4 or 5 versions of Sonar. I doubt they would use resources to bother converting samples that already work fine in their program.
 
3)It will make all of us feel very old when they start making plugins to "give that vintage 16-bit sound!" ;)

Same loops and samples we've been getting for quite a few years now.

Drone7

Anderton
In principle, I agree with you totally. In practice, 24 bits in a distribution medium (important caveat) is not always necessary. 

That's debatable! "Not always necessary" 'only' applies to someone who 'imagines' 24bit gives no increase in sound-quality over 16bit.

 
Well, as I said I do think 24 bits can give an increase in sound quality over 16-bit audio. That's why I record everything with 24-bit resolution. I just think there are some cases where there is no practical difference when you get to the distribution medium.
 

Drone7

Anderton
But if preamp noise, amp noise, or distortion give a dynamic floor of something like -75 dB, there's no audible need for 24 bits of resolution. 

Quite strange for me to hear you say that! I fail to see how 'any' inherent noise (of the minor type found in some sound sources) can significantly reduce or impact very real dynamic range. How am i gonna smash a brickwall to pieces with a baseball bat made of lego??? Feel free to correct me if i'm wrong.

 
It's not a question of being wrong, I think these kinds of discussions are very useful (and educational) for covering the fine points of what we all do. And I don't always claim to be "right," so this is how I learn things as well. If someone who knows more about this finds flaws in my reasoning, please feel free to chime in.
 
In this case, what I mean is...suppose the noise floor is at -72 dB (guitar amps and the like will be much higher, maybe -55 dB or worse, but -72 dB makes the math easy for this example). This can be represented with 13 bits of resolution. The dynamic range of 16-bit audio is about 90 dB, in theory. (i.e., inside the computer. You basically lose 1 bit because the LSB is always switching back and forth between 0 and 1. If you record with 16 bits, it's less because of noise in preamps, circuit board layout, and so on. Some 16-bit converters only deliver about 14 bits of "real" resolution; 24-bit converters do about 20 bits.) So with 16-bit audio, in this example the 3 least significant bits (18 dB of dynamic range) are basically just reproducing noise and with 24-bit audio, the 12 least significant bits would basically be reproducing just noise. However, a noise floor at -72 dB is certainly masking the noise that's below 90 dB, so there is no practical reason to reproduce that extremely low-level noise.
 

Drone7

Anderton
Also, as many loop libraries and samples are downloadable, doing 24 bit samples increases the download time by 50% compared to 16 bit samples. This starts to matter with libraries that reach hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes.

 
Furthermore, this statement seems even more obtuse to me when you have already acknowledged that downloads are par-for-the-course in the majority of the world.
And isn't this the 'exact' same issue i brought-up concerning my need for physical media, and the prohibitive download size of Sonar? And yet apparently now you do see it as an issue and acknowledge it but only in relation to downloading samples, huh??

 
But there's a big difference. First, I do acknowledge that while downloads are becoming the dominant means of distribution, the entire world isn't there yet. I've made it very clear in the other threads that I do not minimize your need to be able to avoid downloads. The fact that there are far fewer people in your position doesn't make the people who are in your position disappear  
 
The difference is that with SONAR, you don't have a choice about the size. The size of the program is the size of the program. But with sample libraries, it is possible to make a choice IF you believe that in some cases, 24-bit resolution is not needed. Of course, as I also mentioned, there are many situations where 24-bit resolution does make a difference and is important, like the percussion library I'm working on which is all 24-bit. But I truly believe that with some samples, it simply doesn't make a difference. You can certainly disagree with that, but I think that when you start examining what's happening in those least significant bits, you can see that using 24 bit resolution to reproduce sounds that are masked by a noise floor is simply not needed. It's like having a car that can go 200 miles per hour in a country where the speed limit is 70 miles per hour. You won't be able to go over 70 miles per hour anyway, so being able to go 200 miles per hour doesn't do you any good.
 

Drone7

Anderton
Also, you can import the files into SONAR as 24 bit files. So if you plan to do a lot of processing, you'll have those eight extra bits to play with to avoid rounding errors and such.

 
I never would and don't ever work that way. I would only ever import 24bit samples from scratch. And FYI I run 'the whole' project in realtime without any bounce-downs ever, softsynths and all, mastering and all, I have everything running in realtime from beginning to end, and when the song is finished I then burn straight to disk from there without a single bounce-down anywhere... to "avoid any rounding errors and such."

 
Well I may have been misleading in what I said, because in SONAR all processing is done with a 64-bit engine anyway, so any round-off errors will be pretty much insignificant regardless.
 
 
I applaud your quest for maintaining as high a standard of quality as possible, and have absolutely zero disagreement that we should all strive for that. And yes, in an ideal world, you could have all samples at 24-bit and while in many cases it would make for no audible improvement, it certainly couldn't hurt. But until we do have an ideal world, where downloads are at South Korean speeds and computers always have enough RAM, file size can matter. However, I personally would make any tradeoffs only if I truly felt that doing so would not impact the sound. 
 
Here's an experiment you can try for yourself.
 
1. Take a 24-bit sample and load it in track.
2. Take that same sample, truncate it to 16 bits with dithering, and load that in another track.
3. Take that same sample, truncate it to 16 bits without dithering, and load that in a third track.
4. Take white noise and load it into a fourth track. Set its level at -72 dB.
5. Now enable exclusive solo mode in SONAR, and have someone click randomly among the three tracks that have samples. See if you can reliably identify which track is which; I can't. But if you can, then you do need to have all all 24-bit samples.
 
If you repeat that same experiment with a pristine sound source that has a reverb tail from an acoustic space (not from a digital reverb) and remove the track with the noise, I think you probably will be able to tell the difference if you turn up the volume sufficiently.