volume=bit-depth in digital mixing?

T

thnmnt

New member
my typical situation is this:

i do all my tracking in acid. i then add fx and get a basic mix. then, i start bouncing my tracks (my acid files generally contain in the neighborhood of 20-30 tracks). basically this means taking all my drum tracks, all my vocal tracks etc... and making groups out of them. i then import these 10-15 tracks into vegas audio where i can effect each track individually with eq, compression etc..

my question is, am i sacrificing bit-depth by doing a volume 'mix' in acid prior to exporting. more specifically, should i be trying to bounce my tracks at the maximum possible volume out of acid for importing into vegas audio.

i know one answer is probably to do the original recordings in vegas as much as possible but i've got 10 songs in pre-mix readiness in acid.

does this make any sense at all? thanks in advance for anyone who can shed some light!

thnmnt
 
Yes....

And you are possibly applying dithering twice, and possibly three times to the end product that you would burn to CD.

Export all the tracks induvidually before ANY dsp is applied to the tracks.

Ed
 
thanks ed -

in Acid, what is the difference between save as mixed wav file (helpful to combine tracks composed of short loops like drums) and export. does save as... use dsp and export not?

also, should i use any fx at all in acid if i'm going to be mixing down in another program? or should i just pump the individual track volumes high and dry and export them to Vegas (my mixdown program)?

thanks for your help.

thnmnt
 
Help menu's and the manual are helpful!

I would look through your softwares help documentation to find out the differences between Export and Save As, etc....

Most mixing software apply dithering to the finale product, unless you have the option to tell it not to. If you plan on applying ANY other dsp to the resulting mixed file, you should elect NOT to dither it until you are done.

Ed
 
naturally - or maybe not - this is the first place i looked. i'm a card carrying member of the RTFM club! unfortunately, no search for 'dithering' returned anything. there are descriptions of export and save as but they are a little too high-level. i keep forgetting that as powerful as Acid is, it's basically marketed to the 'create-a-trance-album-in-a-weekend' crowd.

i've got some posts on sonicfoundry's tech boards - if i find anything i'll post back hear to share the knowledge.

thanks for your help sonusman!

thnmnt
 
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