As I work towards the final steps and of a project, I was wondering if someone could shed some light on dithering... Or point me to something that I can read up on to get more info. I've tried doing some of my own research, but most of what I found was just confusing and overly technical...


I know that dithering is used to convert 24+bit to 16 bit, but that's about all I know. Not sure exactly what settings should be used in what situations. Thanks in advance

Here is the Izotope dithering guide. Its at the bottom of the page. This should be helpful.

I was wondering if someone could shed some light on dithering... Or point me to something that I can read up on to get more info.

I like to use the POW-R's for dithering. 3 i use for rock/metal music and 2 and 1 i use for other genre's Even if you in 16 bit and you have a plugin effect that processes the sound in 24bit or even 32bit float, you need to dither.


Here are some other things i wrote on dithering - http://www.audio-mastering-mixing.com/FAQ___Q_A_Page_2.html#50

Cj

The iZotope Dithering Guide is an excellent resource, albeit a little boring.

1. Read the iZotope guide twice
2. Then forget about it. Which dither algorithm you choose is almost irrelevant. Just remember the one cardinal rule: only apply dither during the final export, and only if you're reducing the bit depth to 16 bits for a CD. Dither is not necessary when encoding an MP3.

BTW, despite popular misuse of the word, "dither" does not refer to converting 24- or 32-bit audio to 16 bits. Its purpose is to mask noise caused by the unavoidable rounding errors that occur during such conversions.

So when I, say, purchase an mp3 on iTunes, is it dithered or is it 24 bit? If its not dithered, what happens when you burn this purchased mp3 onto a CD? If I buy a CD at the store containing the same song I purchased on iTunes, it IS dithered right?

vaultwit


So when I, say, purchase an mp3 on iTunes, is it dithered or is it 24 bit? If its not dithered, what happens when you burn this purchased mp3 onto a CD? If I buy a CD at the store containing the same song I purchased on iTunes, it IS dithered right?

We can't know off the bat if an MP3 from iTunes was dithered or not. The point though is that one need not dither MP3's; they use floating point when created. A CD should have dithered tracks on them being that they were bit-depth reduced to 16-bit format. Straight truncation to 16-bit is never a good idea especially with more processing. 

Dither when reducing bit depth, and only reduce bit depth once. That's it. Dither is just noise that's less noisy than chopped off bits. That's the layman's verion of bitflipper's post.

I need to know whether I need to dither my songs or not. I will be distributing my music online in the form of mp3s, so non-dithering may work, but what if people decide to burn it onto a cd? Then there will be a problem

Which is why I was wondering if songs bought from iTunes, amazon, rhapsody, spotify, etc have dithering or not. Since I'm sure many people by songs from there and burn them onto cd's

vaultwit


I need to know whether I need to dither my songs or not. I will be distributing my music online in the form of mp3s, so non-dithering may work, but what if people decide to burn it onto a cd? Then there will be a problem

Which is why I was wondering if songs bought from iTunes, amazon, rhapsody, spotify, etc have dithering or not. Since I'm sure many people by songs from there and burn them onto cd's

Why is it a problem? It's just an MP3 on a CD