When you select the bit depth, you’re actually choosing the accuracy of the files you create during recording. I’ll go through everything you ever wanted to know about dither but were afraid to ask.

But if you’re still confused, or if you want to know why you should follow these rules, read on. That’s it! If you never want to think about dither again you can stop right here and get back to your latest project. That includes when you bounce files that are the same bit-depth as the ones you recorded. When you export anything other than 32-bit float, you have to dither. In this case, the mastering process will take care of dither for you.

If you’re sending your files for mastering, leave dithering out if you can export 32-bit float files.

Save dithering for when your files are headed outside of your DAW.

If you tracked at 24-bit/44.1kHz, just stay there! If for some reason you need to downsample, be sure to dither during conversion.

Don’t change file types unless you absolutely have to.It helps increase the accuracy of your digital audio files.īefore we get too far into the nuts and bolts, let’s start with the best practices.įollow these three guidelines and dithering won’t cause you any trouble: The noise that dithering adds to your tracks works the same way. The vibration from the plane’s engine actually helped increase the accuracy of the sticky moving parts in the machines.

In fact, the word dither means “nervous vibration.” It comes from how it was discovered.Įngineers found that mechanical aircraft computers performed more accurately in flight than on the ground. I know what you’re thinking, “how can adding noise make my recordings sound better? Isn’t noise a bad thing?”ĭither isn’t just an audio term-and the noise it adds is really more like random variation. What is dithering?ĭither is low level noise added to your audio to reduce errors when changing bit depth. Once you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, you’ll never have to stress about whether to dither or not again. Y’know, topics like loudness, compression, mastering and…ĭithering can be an intimidating subject-it has a lot to do with the fundamentals of digital audio.īut applying dither correctly is incredibly simple and easy. There are a few topics out there that never fail to get engineers ranting and raving.

Ocenaudio tutorial