32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

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Shooshie
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by Shooshie »

I think that you guys are right about the -12 dB for max levels of basic audio tracks. I haven't checked my actual numbers, but just a glance at the faders tells me that's about where I'm ending up.

Could it be that there's just a different set of rules for mixing 100% in 32bfp? I won't be able to go into it and pick things apart and analyze what's going on until the 18th, the cut-off date for the gold master. I think I'm way ahead of schedule, but yesterday I dealt with crashes every time I would touch one fade that, unfortunately is critical. I hate to load things into a new file; does Load get all the takes? I've forgotten. Maybe if I Show All Takes before loading.

A chunk full of distortion at low levels three days ago, today played crystal clear and beautiful. I may have changed a few things; I don't remember. But three days ago it didn't matter what I did, there was distortion! Not the kind that scares you, but the kind that people say, "what's that? Did you hear that?" And you go back and it's scratchy, like phlegm in the throat. Like strings barely on the frets.

Plugins are on stems only, except a noise plugin on the guitar to push down low-level noise from jets going over and construction right outside the studio. We're on the north-wind approach to Love Field, Dallas. My plugs are mostly Waves: a few C6s (not many), a L3 Multimaximizer on the final slot, and the occasional odd de-esser, or MOTU MW Leveler. Altiverb before the L3. Really not a lot of CPU strain going on. Switch to the "recording Mix" with only a plate reverb for some ambience for the vocalist to feel comfortable, and nothing else, and the distortion continues. Not the plugins.

I don't think it's OS X. Open old projects in 24 bits, and no distortion.
That would tend to say that DP 9.13 is not the problem, too.
That leaves 32bfp, and I think that the answer is simply that we have to use different rules. Go in with subtlety from the start. Like Waxman, i've gone back and started some of these mixes from scratch, and they're doing much better. Previously I felt compelled to gain-stage the loudness up to the max before the bounce, so that playback would be at levels where people are comfortable with their volume knob. Now I am focusing on clear tracks all the way to the end, then seeing what I can do before bouncing.

Sorry if I seem obsessed with this. It's just out of my wheelhouse, not responding as per my expectations, so naturally I want to solve it. That makes for long posts for me; I apologize.

Shoosh
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guitardood
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by guitardood »

Shooshie wrote:Wow, I learned a lot there, Guitardood. That was interesting stuff about you. Thanks for posting that.

Shooshie
Interesting what you mentioned about loading a track on another day and the distortion had vanished. Kind of falls in line with the intermittent type memory stuff I was talking about. Another weird thing I've had happen is dropping a mono->stereo plug on a mono track, sometimes comes up with an error complaining that there is already a plug-in in the slot, even though there was none. Would love to hear your findings if you have time to test stuff out on the 18th like you said.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by waxman »

Hmmm... Happiness is warm gun. Bang, Bang, Shoot, Shoot.

FYI. You can crank a signal through DP fader and have it hit red and not HEAR distortion.... But the voltage on plugs is set up like analog equipment. So zero of a fader is like plus 12 or even plus 18 on plugins. It's becomes distortion city. While Shooshie is not experiencing plug in distortion I find that is generally where distortion coming from, especially if I am using older track. Minus -12 is like zero on analog gear.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by oshtakuta »

Robert Randolph wrote:
guitardood wrote: Really sorry for the somewhat irrelevant and long winded post on your thread. My temper got the best of me :(
It's relevant, and the behaviour you mention is extremely annoying.

It's definitely an issue. You are not the first person to complain about it.
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FMiguelez
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by FMiguelez »

waxman wrote: FYI. You can crank a signal through DP fader and have it hit red and not HEAR distortion.... But the voltage on plugs is set up like analog equipment. So zero of a fader is like plus 12 or even plus 18 on plugins. It's becomes distortion city.
Interesting!
So, are you saying that it is normal for SOME plugins to do that? Which plugins would those be? I suppose you are talking about analog-emulation plugins right?

So that behaviour is normal for some, but NOT others?

Hmmm.... Doesn't sound right to me. How are we supposed to know which plugs distort when close to 0dBF and which don't?
waxman wrote:While Shooshie is not experiencing plug in distortion... [snip]
[/quote]
This IS an important distinction. So, Shooshie, were you getting this unwanted distortion even with NO plugins at all in your tests, or only with plugs?

I know it is not necessary to record things hot anymore.
But the issue remains. Whatever we do, distortion should not be heard like that in a 32 bFP environment without plugins.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by mikehalloran »

I understand why processing is done in 32 bit fp.

I've never read a compelling argument for recording audio in 32 bit fp. Still don't understand why anyone would do it on purpose. 24bit is fine with me.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by FMiguelez »

mikehalloran wrote:I understand why processing is done in 32 bit fp.

I've never read a compelling argument for recording audio in 32 bit fp. Still don't understand why anyone would do it on purpose. 24bit is fine with me.
I agree with you, but only when that happens at the individual track-level. I see no advantage here.

However, I do see an advantage of printing the final mix AND individual stems at 32 bFP, especially when the stems are to be treated as individual "mini-masters" that are to be used to be able to assemble different versions of the piece i.e, a version without brass, or without bass.

Also, having the stems at DP's native resolution (32 bFP) allows one to edit lifts and cuts to get the required shorter versions of the piece without worrying about dither VS quantisation distortion. Once all this is done, it's a piece of cake to master them and bounce to whatever final format is needed.

I know that either unwanted artefact (dither noise or quantization distortion) are practically un-hearable at normal listening levels, but is nice to be technically correct and keep every final mix and stem at their maximum resolution until the mastering stage.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by oshtakuta »

manual 9.1
"Track level meters now display the track's level post-fader and pre-pan."
What is it and how was it before???!
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by stubbsonic »

Is there an "M.D." in the house? Paging the M.D.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by guitardood »

mikehalloran wrote:I understand why processing is done in 32 bit fp.

I've never read a compelling argument for recording audio in 32 bit fp. Still don't understand why anyone would do it on purpose. 24bit is fine with me.
Hey Mike,
If your project is set to 32 and you do some tracking, doesn't DP just record at 32 (despite the iface and attached hardware only being in 24)? Is there a setting that that differentiates between the mixing bit rate vs the record bit rate that I'm not aware of? Or is the project bit rate only a "record" bit rate and all processing is at 32 internally? I'm missing something here.

Thanks.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by FMiguelez »

guitardood wrote:Or is the project bit rate only a "record" bit rate and all processing is at 32 internally? I'm missing something here.
That's your answer.
You can choose the bit depth to record audio in the transport settings. This determines the bit depth for recording, merging, etc. Regardless of you choose in that setting (16, 24 or 32 bFP), DP will always process all audio at 32 bFP.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by Shooshie »

waxman wrote:Hmmm... Happiness is warm gun. Bang, Bang, Shoot, Shoot.

FYI. You can crank a signal through DP fader and have it hit red and not HEAR distortion.... But the voltage on plugs is set up like analog equipment. So zero of a fader is like plus 12 or even plus 18 on plugins. It's becomes distortion city. While Shooshie is not experiencing plug in distortion I find that is generally where distortion coming from, especially if I am using older track. Minus -12 is like zero on analog gear.
Here's what was happening. Yes, there were plugs when I started hearing it, because I'd put those on first before getting my balances set; no need to do that twice. As soon as it started happening, and I was hearing the noise, I immediately bypassed the plugs one-by-one to see which one(s) seemed most responsible. Didn't stop the noise. I reduced the faders a great deal, and the noise went away, but it was really too low to hear clearly anyway.

Next, I listened to each track independently, sometimes by selecting where the noise was and just playing the selection. Clear sound. No distortion. I knew I had clean tracks.

Now here is the thing that made it all so disturbing: I wasn't seeing clipping on any of the faders. So I opened the Meter Bridge and displayed the busses and bundles. There, the clipping was going on like mad. Pretty much any bus that was summing two tracks was clipping. This changed everything. I put the plugins back on, set the relative levels, and started experimenting with how I could gain-stage the volume up to where it needs to be without clipping a bus. Any place I had the one guitar track doubled for bass augmentation was sizzling like crazy. I changed the Vocals stem to two stems: Vocals and Background Vocals.

Waves limiters were not stopping it. I tried MOTU limiters, and still no luck. I tried some Nomad Factory and other limiters, but it clearly had nothing to do with the brand or type of limiter I was using; brick walls were simply not stopping the clipping. That's when I got really worried.

Then there was this: I'd put it away, get up the next day, play it, and all distortion gone. Whoa!!! Had I done something magical before I quit the night before? Looking through the UNDO history, it appeared not. I'd work for a while, thinking I was making a lot of progress, then sit back to hear the glorious results, and... all my busses were clipping.

I've mentioned how periodically and unpredictably I would be working and suddenly the last few moves I made would just disappear. There was automation in the Guitar Stem that all disappeared 5 times. The first few times I thought maybe I had done something accidentally; working long hours, sometimes you get sloppy with your hands and brush a key. But after a couple more times, I knew it was not me. On one occasion, the entire chunk I was working on was set back about half an hour. No trace of the stuff I'd done during that time. Yet another time, it was like the whole app blinked, and suddenly I was back in the chunk I'd started in that day. Oddly, this time I didn't lose information, or at least not much; maybe a move or two. (no, I don't have keyboard commands set up for Chunks.)

It may be that the distortions happened after an event like this. I can't tell you for sure, but I worked for a week or two without this ever happening. The weird setbacks, the fade crashes and the distortion all began happening about the same time, and after that, they were intermittent but would all go haywire together.

Now that I've replaced DP with the latest build, none of this seems to be happening. I haven't used it for 24 hours yet, so I'm reluctant to say that it's gone and not returning, but everything is working so much more smoothly that I can't help but think it's fixed. Plus, the fact that it boots in about a tenth of the time. I clicked, and in a few seconds the splash screen and "Open" window had shown up. I was accustomed to getting coffee, coming back, and still waiting for it to come up. Then click the recent file, and it would take even longer for it to open. Now it opens very quickly. I'm going out on a limb and saying that my problems are fixed, but I'll confirm it after, say, 48 hours.

That's a very long way of saying that the faders weren't clipping, nor the plugins, but the busses — only visible after opening the Meter Bridge. Yes, it's all very unusual behavior. I'm gathering from the reports that others have seen it, too.

Oh... yesterday I opened one of my most busy and loaded-up files in 24 bits. No distortion. This was before the update to the new build. This had a couple dozen instruments, automation, and lots of plugins. Loud output. No distortion; clear as a bell. 24 bits all the way.

Lastly, for anyone wondering, my buffer has been set to 512 or 1024. I've tried several settings; nothing helped. But the new build seems happy at 512.

Shooshie
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by Shooshie »

One more thing. In another thread in the Troubleshooting forum, there is a post from Cuttime in which he mentioned the fade crash being fixed in the latest build of DP 9.13. I upgraded to it, and that's when everything got better!

A quote from my response to Cuttime:
  • If nothing else, the fade crashes are fixed! That alone is a huge relief.
    If you're using DP 9.13 build 72359, upgrade immediately to build 72621.
They are both DP 9.13, which can go a long way toward explaining how people using the same "version" can have vastly different experiences. Let's all put our guns away now and face facts: not all builds of a version are equal. In this case, a known bug was fixed in a build without changing the version number. I had the earlier version. The later version has fixed a lot, maybe all.

So... some of these problems, and maybe all of them, turned out to be DP all along.

Shooshie
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by guitardood »

FMiguelez wrote:
guitardood wrote:Or is the project bit rate only a "record" bit rate and all processing is at 32 internally? I'm missing something here.
That's your answer.
You can choose the bit depth to record audio in the transport settings. This determines the bit depth for recording, merging, etc. Regardless of you choose in that setting (16, 24 or 32 bFP), DP will always process all audio at 32 bFP.
Thanks for that. Ever since switching to DP, I had just assumed (I know) that having all audio in the project at 32 bits with it internally mixing at 32 would save a few processor cycles from DP changing the bit size up and down, especially in between plug-ins, which I thought would add up to a lot of cycles on a large project. Perhaps not.
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Re: 32 bit Float question for Magic Dave

Post by guitardood »

Shooshie wrote:Now here is the thing that made it all so disturbing: I wasn't seeing clipping on any of the faders. So I opened the Meter Bridge and displayed the busses and bundles. There, the clipping was going on like mad. Pretty much any bus that was summing two tracks was clipping. This changed everything. I put the plugins back on, set the relative levels, and started experimenting with how I could gain-stage the volume up to where it needs to be without clipping a bus. Any place I had the one guitar track doubled for bass augmentation was sizzling like crazy. I changed the Vocals stem to two stems: Vocals and Background Vocals.
Very interesting. To this day, I don't think I've ever looked at the Meter Bridge. Something to check out to see if I notice similar behavior on my aux busses.
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