Mbit dither

[Perfect Record]

Consider adding Mbit+ dither from iZotope.

It must be cost effective- I have it in an offline processing app that costs less than $100 US.

There is a blind listening test of over 20 dither types online (sorry, I don't recall the URL.) Mbit+ was the leader of the voting.

Because I like the sound, I've been dithering offline with Mbit in Sample Manager on my Mac, then re-importing those files for CD master production. I'm very happy with the sound.

I've been a big fan of POW-R in the past, but haven't added it yet to my Pyramix system. After working with Mbit for the last couple months, I'd really like to have it in Pyramix.

[fl]

Just to bump this thread, and to encourage the folks at Merging to also consider licensing the Izotope Sample Rate Conversion, or at the very least SoX - both of which offer far better performance than the SRC found in Pyramix. An interesting website for more information on this subject is http://src.infinitewave.ca/

I realize that with the introduction of the new Real Time SRC feature in 6.2, that this may be trickier to implement.

In my own researches on the subject, I've found that the Media Manager's Quick Convert > Sample Rate Conversion (the one that converts directly to other standard Sample Rates, like 44,100, 48,000, 88,200, 96,000, etc.) setting of "Very High" quality, yields the same results as the Real Time SRC setting of "High" - I suspect that they're both the same converter. Same story with the "High" quality setting in the Media Manager, and the "Medium" Real Time conversion. It might be an idea to standardize the labeling here, to minimize confusion. The highest quality settings are still not the equal of Izotope, SoX or r8brain free, and Pyramix's lower quality settings yield greater noise, distortion and aliasing.

The Resampler, the "other" SRC in the Media Manager (that gives you semi-tone and/or percentage control) is somewhere, in terms of quality and artifacts, between the "Very High" and "High" settings in the Media Manager (or the "High" and "Medium" in the Real Time SRC).

There are some workarounds. As has been pointed out in another thread, the Izotope Dither and SRC are available in the Ozone compressor plug-in, and in the "Advanced" version of Izotope RX. They are also available in Audiofile Engineering's Wave Editor (for the Mac). SoX and r8brain are free (although SoX asks for contributions, and Voxengo offers a higher quality "Pro" version of r8brain for $149 USD). So there are alternatives out there for both dither and SRC. I've been working with Melodyne Editor for tuning, and although its VST implementation is not compatible with Pyramix, it works very well as a standalone program, and offers a powerful means of adjusting pitch.

[Thomas Grubb]

Hi Frank,

The Mbit dither certainly seems the most natural to me (at least, I don't notice it, as opposed to POW3 which I "tell" myself I notice, though it probably depends on what I had for dinner the previous night!). The Ozone plugin is also handy just as a final check for levels and for using the limiter to handle the "much talked about yet disputed" intersample peaks. On my system though version 4, while using less computing power than version 3, is much slower when doing a non-realtime bounce - I don't quite know why.

Also check out Weiss Saracon for conversion. Despite costing an arm and a couple of legs, I find it does a really good job at keeping the depth and openness in a recording. I liked it better than R8Brain certainly.

Cheers,
Tom