Distortion as a built in effect: Why so much aliasing?

[EvilDragon]

Did you tried to work with 96 or 192kHz DAW sessions? I dropped 44.1kHz sessions few years ago after I realized how enormous difference have Spire synth in 96kHz. Currently I can't complain about aliasing in distortion or lack of oversampling in a plugin. Higher SR is the shortest and easiest way to get good sound of distortion.

Some of my better plugins offer internal over-sampling so I don't feel I need to take the performance penalty with running 96k sessions. Also my available ports on my adat convertors would he halved as I'd have to enable smux.

I can't. I make all my music in real time, so I need as much to be happening as possible with a 32 sample buffer, and my i7 3.4 gighz processor can't take any more than 48. Most days I just run it at 44.1, unless I'm setting out to do a serious recording.

Yeah, time to get that i9-9900K. Be a real gearslut

[bill45]

The saturator x in sampletank 4, is pretty good

[lwj]

I’ve been using 96khz for a while now and the cpu hit is worth it. For distortion but reverbs and the like also seem to benefit.

Hi-res lo-fi is where it’s at

[simon.a.billington]

It’s the nature of distortion, that’s why the “better” algorithms oversample. It puts the aliasing well above our hearing range. It’s actually one of the pro arguments to working at higher sample rates, that and giving more information for your pitch and time algorithms to work with in order to produce better results. Sadly, though, the better oversampling algorithms add latency. Which is why it’s not a good idea to use in instruments.

The way I would generally handle it is to use the built-in effects while tracking and arranging, but swap it out for a higher quality third party effect when it comes to mixing. But it might not always be necessary as once it’s a part of a fuller mix it might not even be noticeable.

If your concerned with live, no one ever pays that close attention to the quality of your distortion algorithms. Even if they were, most PA systems are too sucky for it to be obvious.

[Ishanor]

While distortion basics seem simple there are so many variants and ways to generate it depending on the type you want, probably you will be better served by a distortion pedal or a specific plugin, guitar/bass dedicated plugins, pedal and amp sims can work very well.

[zerocrossing]

It’s the nature of distortion, that’s why the “better” algorithms oversample. It puts the aliasing well above our hearing range. It’s actually one of the pro arguments to working at higher sample rates, that and giving more information for your pitch and time algorithms to work with in order to produce better results. Sadly, though, the better oversampling algorithms add latency. Which is why it’s not a good idea to use in instruments.

The way I would generally handle it is to use the built-in effects while tracking and arranging, but swap it out for a higher quality third party effect when it comes to mixing. But it might not always be necessary as once it’s a part of a fuller mix it might not even be noticeable.

If your concerned with live, no one ever pays that close attention to the quality of your distortion algorithms. Even if they were, most PA systems are too sucky for it to be obvious.

Oh, when I say, “live,” I mean “live for myself.” So I notice.

But I have work arounds. Mostly I just rely on hardware for when it counts. I’m just wondering why more devs don’t at least offer an distortion oversampling mode for rendering.

[simon.a.billington]

It’s the nature of distortion, that’s why the “better” algorithms oversample. It puts the aliasing well above our hearing range. It’s actually one of the pro arguments to working at higher sample rates, that and giving more information for your pitch and time algorithms to work with in order to produce better results. Sadly, though, the better oversampling algorithms add latency. Which is why it’s not a good idea to use in instruments.

The way I would generally handle it is to use the built-in effects while tracking and arranging, but swap it out for a higher quality third party effect when it comes to mixing. But it might not always be necessary as once it’s a part of a fuller mix it might not even be noticeable.

If your concerned with live, no one ever pays that close attention to the quality of your distortion algorithms. Even if they were, most PA systems are too sucky for it to be obvious.

Oh, when I say, “live,” I mean “live for myself.” So I notice.

But I have work arounds. Mostly I just rely on hardware for when it counts. I’m just wondering why more devs don’t at least offer an distortion oversampling mode for rendering.

Oh right, that kind of live. Haha!!

Some devs offer oversampling by choice, while others do it automatically. I personally would like to see an automatic setting for freezing and bouncing. I tend to ignore it while recording as long as I have a fairly close approximation. I know the sound can always be refined while mixing.