Best audio file format to bounce to for mastering

  • Thread starter Thread starter adclark
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adclark

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Most of my finished mixes are bounced to 24 bit-.aif files. Is this ok? I like .aif because they play in iTunes without converting to another format.
 
.aif are fine as well as .wav format.

My usual recommendation is 24 bit stereo interleaved files at the same sample rate used to record the tracks.
 
The last tune Finster put up was .aif, and they sounded fine. I think it will work just great for you.
Ed

Edit...looks like Masteringhouse just said the same thing......I was a bit late....
 
masteringhouse said:
.aif are fine as well as .wav format.

My usual recommendation is 24 bit stereo interleaved files at the same sample rate used to record the tracks.
Click to expand...
Interesting. This raises a question for me. I normally record at 32bit/48kHz. This would mean that I'd have to dither to 24bit during mixdown... and conventional wisdom says dithering twice is not a good idea. Does this mean that working at 24bits in the first place would be preferred?
 
noisewreck said:
Interesting. This raises a question for me. I normally record at 32bit/48kHz. This would mean that I'd have to dither to 24bit during mixdown... and conventional wisdom says dithering twice is not a good idea. Does this mean that working at 24bits in the first place would be preferred?
Click to expand...

For the tracks themselves 32 bit float is fine. I would however mix down to 24 bit. Dither would be recommended when going from 32 bit to 24 even though 32 bit float holds the numeric portion of the data at 24 bits. This step could be avoided if the original file was 24 bit.

Also, in regards to "conventional wisdom" dithering more than once is OK if you do it correctly (whenever going to a smaller wordlength). For example when the internal processing of a plugin is greater than 24 bit and then gets fed into another device at 24 bit, dithering should be used. What you want to avoid even more is wordlength reductions from 24 to 16 and back again more than multiple dithering.
 
Thanks for the reply Tom. Yes, I'd never go back and forth between bit depths. Frankly, I don't even see a scenario where I'd need to do that.
 
masteringhouse said:
.aif are fine as well as .wav format.

My usual recommendation is 24 bit stereo interleaved files at the same sample rate used to record the tracks.
Click to expand...

Technically speaking, WAV (RIFF) basicallly -is- AIFF. The @#$%^#@^%s at Microsoft just decided that they wanted the AIFF metadata to be in little endian format. (Not the audio data, mind you---it was already possible to have either little or big endian audio data in a standard AIFF file before Microsoft's little embrace-and-mutilate-uh-I-mean-extend-fest....)

That's #13 in my top ten reasons I hate Microsoft.... :D
 
I thought AIFF was Apple's format, not Microsoft's.
Wave is Microsoft's, right?
Edit: From Wikipedia

Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is a audio file format standard used for storing sound data on personal computers. The format was co-developed by Apple Computer based on Electronic Arts Interchange File Format (IFF) and is most commonly used on Apple Macintosh computer systems. AIFF is also used by Silicon Graphics Incorporated.

The audio data in an AIFF file is uncompressed big-endian pulse-code modulation (PCM) so the files tend to be much larger than files that use lossless or lossy compression formats such as APE and MP3. The AIFF-Compressed (AIFF-C or AIFC) format supports compression ratios as high as 6:1.

WAV (or WAVE), short for WAVE form audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is a variant of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks", and thus also close to the IFF and the AIFF format used on Macintosh computers. It takes into account some peculiarities of the Intel CPU such as little endian byte order. The RIFF format acts as a "wrapper" for various audio compression codecs. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw audio.
 
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