Parco, what you are asking (if I am understanding you correctly) can be a complicated answer that I cannot give a short answer to. This topic has come up so many times (and it's quite interesting too) and explained in detail by people much more competent than I am.
 
Here are a few links I found:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Dithering-internally-m1553145.aspx
http://forum.cakewalk.com/SONAR-Dithering-m1825218.aspx
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Dithering-Revisited-m1847966.aspx
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Dithering-in-Sonar-m2381249.aspx
 
Dithering is explained how it is used in sonar in these threads. You will have to read them to find out what you want to do. There is a choice. Only you can make it!
 
 

lawp
what other reasons might there be? I've only ever used it in the context of reducing bit depth

See the links in my above post.

Thanks for the links :-) all seem to be about bit depth reduction/truncation? I was wondering what your other uses were?

If enabled dithering is applied whenever bit depth conversions occur in the engine, during playback as well as when bouncing a mix.
Since the engine is always running in floating point mode, dithering typically takes place just before outputting to the audio driver. This is because most drivers require 24 or 16 bit integer sample buffers. For a driver that handles float formats no dithering would take place.
The same occurs when exporting audio to integer wave formats - we dither before writing to the wave file.

Ah. I did not realize that things got automatically dithered like that in the background. I don't understand it but I guess I don't have to if I never noticed it. ;-)
 
Actually DrewFX was explaining some of the bit depth of plugins and the engine to me the other day now that I think about it. I guess I should have realized that would require something to bring it back down to my project bit depth setting. I wish I wuz smartur.

Grem
Parco, what you are asking (if I am understanding you correctly) can be a complicated answer that I cannot give a short answer to. This topic has come up so many times (and it's quite interesting too) and explained in detail by people much more competent than I am.
 
Here are a few links I found:




 
Dithering is explained how it is used in sonar in these threads. You will have to read them to find out what you want to do. There is a choice. Only you can make it!
 
 

Hello and I'd just read all of them, but not exactly what I want to know.
Actually I doubt that do any guys here really know what is "offline audio" and "online audio" I'm really meaning......

parco

Grem
Parco, what you are asking (if I am understanding you correctly) can be a complicated answer that I cannot give a short answer to. This topic has come up so many times (and it's quite interesting too) and explained in detail by people much more competent than I am.
 
Here are a few links I found:
 
 
 
 
 
Dithering is explained how it is used in sonar in these threads. You will have to read them to find out what you want to do. There is a choice. Only you can make it!
 
 

Hello and I'd just read all of them, but not exactly what I want to know.
Actually I doubt that do any guys here really know what is "offline audio" and "online audio" I'm really meaning......

No... I get it now. Online as in the processing taking place during transport and recording. Offline as in what is occurring during rendering. It's just your first post was a little hard to understand. Greetings from Canada.

parco
 
Actually I doubt that do any guys here really know what is "offline audio" and "online audio" I'm really meaning......

If Noel failed to answer your question then I believe you need to better define what you mean by offline and online.

he didn't mention any uses other than bit depth reduction!!?!111one!on1

lawp
Thanks for the links :-) all seem to be about bit depth reduction/truncation? I was wondering what your other uses were?

Lawp, you seem to want me to answer you directly about what other uses there are for dithering?
 
Now as I said in the post I referenced you to, I explained I am not so competent sometimes in clearly explaining what I am thinking. For that I say I am sorry. No confusion was meant.
 
To be clear now, Noel said what I was trying to say.