Bitwig

jondev87 · Post by **jondev87** » Tue Apr 01, 2014 10:12 pm

Anybody know?

Thanks
Jon

iONikbeats · Post by **iONikbeats** » Tue Apr 01, 2014 10:36 pm

Personally I see no reason why this would be necessary. There is MORE than enough headroom in 32 bit floating point numbers. I'm not entirely sure which format of Floating Point numbers are typically used in audio applications, but I imagine the exponent portion of the number would allow you to represent the values closer to zero?

Either way, unless there was some computational benefit to using double precision floating point numbers in audio (which I do doubt). Typically double precision floating points have a longer latency bound for division/multiplication (form multiplication is 4 CPU cycles for single and 5 for double).

TL;DR: 32 bit offers sufficient headroom and the cons of 64bit (speed) likely make it not worth it to have more (inaudible) headroom.

iONikbeats · Post by **iONikbeats** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 10:50 pm

Actually after some reading, it seems that using double precision floating points is pretty common in audio these days! I stand corrected!

qtheerearranger · Post by **qtheerearranger** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:02 pm

Yeah I mean 32 Bit floating is phenomenal and to my knowledge there are only a few DAWs with 64 Bit Floating, including Pro Tools. I'm sure Bit wig will get there one day, but like if you care about 64 bit floating more than the creative freedom bit wig offers you, switch to a DAW that offers that until Bit Wig gets there.

billcarroll · Post by **billcarroll** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:27 pm

qtheerearranger wrote:Yeah I mean 32 Bit floating is phenomenal and to my knowledge there are only a few DAWs with 64 Bit Floating, including Pro Tools. I'm sure Bit wig will get there one day, but like if you care about 64 bit floating more than the creative freedom bit wig offers you, switch to a DAW that offers that until Bit Wig gets there.

Are you saying you know the audio engine is 32 bit floating point? I haven't managed to find it documented anywhere.

qtheerearranger · Post by **qtheerearranger** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:58 pm

I just assumed it was, haha. As I said though, I'm sure bit wig will get caught up one day, they just started though! It's kinda unusual for a DAW company to not even have one quote about their audio engine on their website however.

billcarroll · Post by **billcarroll** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 1:09 am

qtheerearranger wrote:I just assumed it was, haha. As I said though, I'm sure bit wig will get caught up one day, they just started though! It's kinda unusual for a DAW company to not even have one quote about their audio engine on their website however.

I didn't find it in the manual either.

jondev87 · Post by **jondev87** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 1:50 am

I'm not fussed either way, just curious to know, I imagine it would be 64 though I think the only DAW that isn't these days is Cubase which is still 32.

earlevel · Post by **earlevel** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 5:15 am

The trouble with saying "64-bit" these days...well, I think most/all of the people here in the thread so far understand the difference between a 64-bit OS, and processors, which is about memory addressing, and 64-bit floating point audio, but even then...

There's 64-bit audio busses, and there's 64-bit computation. The latter is pretty trivia for host-based DSP, at least using the general-purpose floating point features of modern processors. And yes, there are plenty of times where 32-bit floating point isn't good enough for audio DSP algorithms (essentially 25 bits of precision, but multiplies and accumulations gets immediately truncated to that same precision—the resulting error within an iterative algorithm can degrade it noticeably).

For most DAWs, the audio busses/paths (the buffers between plug-ins and mixer channels) remain 32-bit floats. That's really not a problem, since the extra precision is mainly needed during intermediate calculations—inside the plug-ins, for instance.

So while some of the latest DAWs touts 64-bit audio paths throughout, I don't see that at a serious improvement, but more of a marketing gimmick. And in the end, it's going to be output to a 24-bit DAC, and your hardware and your ears can't even resolve that much. I don't see enough error accumulating to matter.

trevorr · Post by **trevorr** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 11:33 am

In Reaper you can switch bit depth on the fly and even on 12 bit i can't hear difference with 64 bit. Only on 8-bit i can notice significant reduction of DR and noise.

billcarroll · Post by **billcarroll** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:19 pm

It would be cool if one of the wonderful Bitwig folks would answer this one for us.

HamHat · Post by **HamHat** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 9:34 pm

No point in having a 64 bit audio engine until Bitwig implements true pan knobs and mono tracks. If you can't get the proper audio from source it doesn't make to much of a difference.

billcarroll · Post by **billcarroll** » Thu Oct 16, 2014 5:40 pm

Has this question re: the Bitwig audio engine been answered anywhere?

Also, are there plans for 32-bit float recording?

It would be really cool if someone from Bitwig could clear this all up.

ThomasHelzle · Post by **ThomasHelzle** » Thu Oct 16, 2014 7:58 pm

It's 32 Bit floating point since that is what makes the most sense at this point in time.

Almost all audio interfaces are 24 Bit non-floatingpoint AFAIK, so that is why recording is using the same I would assume.

But if you have a case where it would make real sense to do it differently, write to tech-support and tell them about it. The devs are very down to earth but open to sensible ideas - just not into marketing fluff

Cheers,

Tom

billcarroll · Post by **billcarroll** » Thu Oct 16, 2014 8:34 pm

ThomasHelzle wrote:It's 32 Bit floating point since that is what makes the most sense at this point in time.

Almost all audio interfaces are 24 Bit non-floatingpoint AFAIK, so that is why recording is using the same I would assume.

But if you have a case where it would make real sense to do it differently, write to tech-support and tell them about it. The devs are very down to earth but open to sensible ideas - just not into marketing fluff

Cheers,

Tom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt-EJhDDHUI

This is the tip of the iceberg. The more processing you do on a file, the more useful 32-bit floating point becomes.

Bitwig

KVR Audio

64 Bit FP Audio Engine?