To dither, or not to dither?

[BertKoor]

I've erring on the side of caution, and just not dithering.

The side of caution says you should dither

[irpacynot]

I've erring on the side of caution, and just not dithering.

The side of caution says you should dither

Ugh...you're confusing me now. I thought you were the one who said only dither when exporting down.

Now I need to go back and re-read this entire thread.

[BertKoor]

Then perhaps I don't understand what you're doing. Wasn't this about exporting all along?

If dithering is an option on importing a 16bit wav in your project, then indeed skip that. It's likely already dithered when it was made, so you'd just add faint noise.

[mjolnir]

if you're not really sure, do it both ways:

1) dithered render
2) render without dither

and then compare them.
if you really can't hear any difference, then i'd recommend ignoring or skipping dither options from then and on out.

test it with 32-bit, 24-bit, and 16-bit.
if you can't hear it, can anybody else hear it?
do you get any complaints?

i quit using dither forever and i don't miss it.
i think it was a scam except for special 16-bit cases and of course 8-bit like in SoundEdit 1.0 from around 1988.

[ultrashock]

After 18 khz cut into Low Pass filter and make Render with dither and the sound seems cleaner ))

[swilow11]

When bouncing a track/clip in Bitwig, I'm choosing to not dither despite knowing it's essentially inaudible. If I can just as easily choose not to dither as to choose, I'm all for not adding unnecessary noise to a track. My rather murky logic, is dither will ultimately be applied when bouncing the master and it...kinda stacks up if you're re-dithering dithered tracks? No idea if true tbh

[irpacynot]

Then perhaps I don't understand what you're doing. Wasn't this about exporting all along?

If dithering is an option on importing a 16bit wav in your project, then indeed skip that. It's likely already dithered when it was made, so you'd just add faint noise.

Yeah, this was in reference to exporting. But I thought the consensus was that, unless I'm rendering down to a lower bit or sample rate, it's generally better to bypass dithering.

[Medenka]

OP, your process, as described on page 1, is quite lo-fi. You should worry about other things and forget about dithering, or not. You don't say what mics you use to record on the VS-880EX (they add noise), but I'm sure this mixer also adds noise, despite its being digital. Then you also upsample. That's THE big compromise, you should be worried about that the most. Why you would use Waveform and not Reaper to mix is beyond me, also I think Waveform should be configurable to work at your original sample rate - 44100.

So you'd have to worry about improving your knowledge first, then improving your process. Dithering is relevant for 12-bit or 8-bit, and you're not using that at all. Or for extreme hi-fi, but you're exporting to youtube. So, for your needs, dithering is useless. Do it or not, won't make a difference.

[Ah_Dziz]

No reason to dither unless you're dropping bits. Even then it can be superfluous. Any target bit depth over 18 bits should not need it. You should also normalize before dithering to get the best sample to noise ratio and to not lose any data in the least significant bits. I wouldn't worry about it at all if you aren't hearing quantization noise.

[osiris]

Maybe. I had a track with noise on it, wouldn't go away even when not playing. I think I had an amp too cranked, but I tried fiddling with everything and nothing worked. Ozone has a Dither and it's got more than a point and shoot kind of thing, there are a myriad of choices. I'll tell you one of those worked and I got zero noise. I don't know why or how, but it did.

[mixtur.se]

Some dithering plugins also have an auto black feature which turns off dithering when there’s silence as it would otherwise be heard (especially if compressed, ex for radio). Some pligimsmalso offers different shakes, ex Waves L2 which has non-linear noise to make it less obvious. Others are adaptable s that the noise is aligned with whatever frequencies present in any given moment (ex a bass drone should not be processed with high frequency noise etc.).

[irpacynot]

Thanks folks for the additional feedback. Good know some of the various options and reasons to use or not to use the feature.

For now, considering the other hardware and resources, I haven't really messed with it.