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connorrothstein
connorrothstein
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Dithering Master Confusion

May 28, 2012 10:27 PM

Hey guys, my name is Connor and I'm just finishing up recording an album with my band at our home studio. I've used Audition 3 for all the recording and used it's built-in plug-ins for mixing, however, I want to export my final stereo mixes and do the mastering in a separate session with iZotope Ozone.

 

My problem is that I don't know how to export my mixdowns as 32 bit files (because that's what I'm supposed to use for mastering I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) out of audition without dither. The box is permanently grayed out and it looks like Audition is forcing me to dither my mixdowns when I try to export them as the default file type. I want to do the dithering through iZotope at the end of mastering instead of with Audition's built-in settings during mixdown.

 

Any help would be gratefully appreciated, I spent a while looking for advice on Google and on here, but I couldn't find anything about the grayed out box. I feel like I'm just not getting a fundamental concept about the whole bit-thing, but maybe I'm just missing an obvious setting or something.

 

Thanks so much, I really appreciate it.


-Connor R.

652 Views   1 Reply   Latest reply: SteveG(AudioMasters), May 31, 2012 2:56 PM
 
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  • SteveG(AudioMasters)
    4,817 posts
    Oct 26, 2006
    Currently Being Moderated
    1. SteveG(AudioMasters),
    May 31, 2012 2:56 PM   in reply to connorrothstein
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    The reason that it's greyed out is that dither is never applied to 32-bit files - indeed because of the format of them, it's not possible to do so. So you just save your 32-bit file, and follow the instructions in the Ozone manual carefully - it's not entirely obvious what you have to do, especially when you save the final file.

     

    Just so you are clear about this, it goes like this: You open the 32-bit file in Ozone, and then set the dither the way you want it within Ozone. This will put 'virtual dither' on the 32-bit Floating Point file. The important step though is the next one - which is that you file-convert this 32-bit file within Audition to 16-bit without any Audition dither at all. This is the point where it's important to turn the dithering off, and that option should be available to you when you do the conversion.

     

    You might be wondering why this is necessary, and the reason is very simple; you only ever dither once. What Ozone did was to dither your 32-bit Floating Point file at the 16-bit level, and what saving it as a 16-bit integer file does is  to turn the virtual Floating Point information into a lower bit depth integer format, leaving the dither right at the bottom of it. Dithering it again in Audition during this process would screw the whole thing up a treat.

     
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