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Obviously it exports, but I mean to the sound. I always feel that the track sounds "different" when I export it. Not necessarily in a bad way though. But that might be because I don't have the DAW in front of me too.

it sometimes automatically dithers your track. although there will probs be an option for this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_audio

Thanks for the article, I'll check that out later. I don't really know too much about the technical stuff behind digital audio, but I've always wanted to learn. I just never know where to start.

I guess it could sound different if you are exporting at a different quality than the DAW is running in? Is this even possible? Everything I just said might be total bullshit. I prefer working with audio and bounce down parts of tracks quite often during my process. Never really had any problems I am aware of.

I'm the total opposite. I'd rather work with midi for the majority of a track. But working with audio is handy for some stuff. But I don't know shit about bits and dithering etc. I need to hop on that shit and read some books.

i now that daws offer 32 bit and higher options
i have like 92000 hrtz and sth on my recorder but i still use like 44100 and 16 bit as record and export
i cant tell how well it might sound in 32 or higher but yeah i guess thats the stuff films and really good systems use and require :5

they don tofefr higehr than 32 i think but like higher than 44100?1

The netlabel I submit tunes to most often asks for 24bit 44100khz audio for submissions. I can probably ask the ME why we wants it in 24bit instead of 16.

It's actually impossible to export at the same 'quality' as the project runs at.
Then again most people work with a lot of samples and those are of course already 'bounced down' or converted.

Dithering is only a minor part, in my opinion it's not necessary to focus on this as a producer*. I'll try to explain what it tries to accomplish:

Digital audio takes samples at a certain sample rate (frequency) and assigns a number of bits to each sample (amplitude). When you have really dynamic music, you might have some soft parts that are really close to 0 bits, so no amplitude. With high bit rates this is barely a problem and it's no problem at all in modern floating point daws.
But, as soon as you down sample, for CD format for example, these low readings will get truncated which leads to quantization errors.. Let's skip that part for now, it's basically something you don't want.
Dithering is just a little white noise that you add to your audio program, to avoid these rounding errors from creating problems in your sound. It does increase the noise floor by a little though, so it should always be the very last step in the process.

*To keep the words to a minimum, I'll make another post later on why I think most people reading this forum won't need it

Ok I'm following you. Isn't the noise floor in a digital context practically non existent?

Maybe noise floor is not the best term. Just noise might be better.
Yes, in digital it is non existent, but we can't hear 0's and 1's Converters create unwanted noise.

Ahhhh I see. I know being well versed in this stuff isn't really necessary for producing, but still, I would love to know it.

Maybe its just your media player. I used windows media player and i tunes in the past but they both seem to sound a bit shitter than vlc. its almost like there is some compression or automatic gain control on windows media player.

becuase in your daw it will sound as it is. but perhaps when you play it back aomething is different

Sinestepper wrote:Maybe its just your media player. I used windows media player and i tunes in the past but they both seem to sound a bit shitter than vlc. its almost like there is some compression or automatic gain control on windows media player.

opposite for me.. vlc makes stuff sound like shit loses loads of high end and media player is fine
but ye as per OP i do sometimes find when i export stuff it loses a bit of crispness :/

I didn't know that different media players could have a dispostion in terms of coloring the sound. But then again, I don't know how they work, so it doesn't surprise me. But the change can't really be that drastic can it? Because wouldn't that make track almost impossible to mix due to the fact that you wouldn't be able to get an accurate reference when cross checking your mixes on different systems?

Sinestepper wrote:it sometimes automatically dithers your track. although there will probs be an option for this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_audio

Fucking dithering? You're like two decades in the past.

Lol! You can't hear dithering, no chance. The quantization noise is way below the level of the music, so dithered or undithered makes no difference to human ears.

If you're exporting and your tune sounds different then it could be one of your plugins. Some export at a higher quality than they use when played live. Or it could be another setting, but I doubt that it has anything to do with dithering.

Simulant wrote:Lol! You can't hear dithering, no chance. The quantization noise is way below the level of the music, so dithered or undithered makes no difference to human ears.

If you're exporting and your tune sounds different then it could be one of your plugins. Some export at a higher quality than they use when played live. Or it could be another setting, but I doubt that it has anything to do with dithering.

Unless you export it in 16 bits.

export settings for ableton (since i know ur an ableton user):

file type: wav (aiff is fine though)
sample rate: 44,100
bit depth: 24 (i've heard 16 is fine though, the larger the bit depth, the larger the file i believe)
dither: triangular
NEVER CREATE ANALYSIS FILES