What is 'Bit Meter' for?

I was going to post that same question. I noticed if i set it to 24, all the pretty colors dance at 24, if i set it at 16, all the colors dance at 16.. and if i set it to manual(i think thats the name) they do the conga all over the place

CJ

It was originally intended as a demonstration tool for shows and clinics, etc. The BitMeter shows typical distribution of the numbers representing the audio within various bit depths.

Set it to 16 to see how your audio would be represented on a CD

Set it to 24 to see how your audio might be represented over your 24Bit soundcard, or when exported to a 24Bit file.

Set it to Float and see how your audio would be represented in either 32 or 64 Bit floats (this will switch automatically depending on the "Double Precision" setting in Options|Audio.

For an interesting Demo.
1. Patch three bitmeters in a bus. Set one to 16, another to 24, the last to Float.
2. Patch a synth and choose a patch with a long (maybe 5 seconds) release time
3. Record a one-note clip to play thru the synth.
4. Make sure effect tails after stopping is on.

Play the song and watch the meters. As the sound of the synth decays, you will see when the least significant bit of a CD stops changing and goes dim. After this point, there would be nothing on the CD.

But you will continue to see some of the least significant bits of the 24 still flickering. When the last of those is gone, there is no more sound over your soundcard (or in a 24Bit file).

But - wow - look at how long the Float bits keep going - especially if set to Double Precision.

The idea is to show that in a large project, the finest details of the contribution of that synth would still be mixed into the final product LONG after that synth would stop being rendered on a CD or even a high-end sound card.

And of course the fact that it will ONLY show 64 Lights in SONAR doesn't hurt

But besides all that, it does have the pretty lights.

ORIGINAL: Rothchild

It flashes lights all purdy and that, but what do I use it for?

Child

hey John!-

this I think shows you what I meant in an earlier post about losing bit resolution at lower levels... you get the full compliment of bits, it's just that there are fewer of them describing the soundwave, and more of them describing 0, as your soundwave gets closer and closer to silence. Or something like that... I'm probably not too good at "describing" this technically my own self! More bits "on", or "1", more amplitude- more bits "off", or "0"- less amplitude...

This is of course why people invented dither for when you approach silence-

something like that...! I think-
Ev

I've heard that some folks are making a good living at carnivals by guessing the name of a piece of music when they cannot hear it but can see the bit patterns in bit meter. They are only really good at this when they use the full 64 bits, however.

i think it's so all the Sonar users can go .. "look you PT ****es !! my Sonar keeps going long
after your 24bit piece of poo truncates out" .. sadly, it all get truncated out when it
hits CD/MP3 . . but .. at least we have validation that the 64bit pipeline is churning
along as advertised ;-)

jeff

i think it's so all the Sonar users can go .. "look you PT ****es !! my Sonar keeps going long
after your 24bit piece of poo truncates out"

Sonar is the Duracell bunny!

But... PT uses 48-point fixed, not 24-bit.

ORIGINAL: ooblecaboodle

i think it's so all the Sonar users can go .. "look you PT ****es !! my Sonar keeps going long
after your 24bit piece of poo truncates out"

Sonar is the Duracell bunny!

But... PT uses 48-point fixed, not 24-bit.

Well .. kind a sorta ..

On HD/TDM, the Mixer app that's resident on the hardware has 48 bit fixed point
at the summation points... the TDM insert channels are 24bit and the max depth
that a BWF/WAV file can be is 24bit.

On LE/MP, the pipeline is 32bit floats..

jeff

...