Hi Daniel :) this is the most important email for me at the moment. Thank you.
> Hi Ralf, > >> I'm fine with the quality of DAT, 48KHz 16-bit, but I've no experience >> with recording using Linux. 44.1KHz 16-bit seems to be not fine while >> producing with Linux. > > Your sound card can do better. Check the messages window in Jack > Control, because Jack will try 32-bit I/O first, then if that fails, > fall back to 24-bit, and if that fails, finally try 16-bit. As for > sample rate, it's practical to record at 96KHz if you have the disc > space, but depending on the material you're recording, you may not > hear a big improvement over 48KHz. Disc space is no problem any more. Before reading your email I started a song with 48KHz 16-bit. Fluidsynth seems to be limited to 16-bits, but I decided to choose 16-bit because Rosegarden only submits 16-bit and 32-bit, but not 24-bit and 24-bit is what the Envy microchip can do. Maybe I should use Ardour for recording, but I prefer to have all Tracks in one application, resp. in one window. Until now I didn't record anything (for the song I'm working on), I only played Fluidsynth via MIDI data. Fluidsynth's sound quality is as good as the sound quality of the Alesis D4, resp. the quality of Fluidsynth is better, because there is nearly no background noise. I have some instruments with better and some with less good sound quality but the D4 and also Fluidsynth are absolutely okay. Normally I shouldn't be able to hear any difference between 48KHz 16-bit and the original sound when working with my home equipment. When my DAT recorders were fine, the Aiwa HD-S1 and the Sony DTC-670 were good enough at 48KHz. If it should be that Linux or the Envy sound card won't be fine at 48KHz and 16-bit, I'll try a higher sample rate and more depth of bit. 44,1 and 16-bit aren't fine with Linux and the Envy sound card. In some cases 32KHz and 12-bit (non linear instead of regular linear) the Sony DAT was fine for some audio material. An astonishing thing is, that if 32KHz 12bit were not fine with the audio sources, it were not the highs, but the bases that won't be fine. >> And how can I convert the mastering to CD quality > > I strongly recommend that you reduce and dither to 16-bit at the very > last stage in the mastering process, rather than at any point before. > You can do this by connecting your Jack application to Jamin, then > bit-reducing and dithering the audio returned from Jamin. If you bit > reduce before sending the audio to Jamin, then all those extra bits > will be wasted, because you'll be doing DSP on the 16-bit audio. > > The way I do this is to create a bus in Ardour called 'jamin return'. > The Ardour session for mastering is made up of 32-bit stereo mixes, > one per track, which have been exported from earlier Ardour multitrack > sessions. In the mastering session, the stereo output of Ardour's > master bus is connected to Jamin's inputs, and the outputs of Jamin > are connected to the inputs of Ardour's 'jamin return' bus, as well as > the hardware output for the studio monitors. That way, I get to listen > to Jamin's output via the 24-bit hardware of the sound card. > > When I choose Export in Ardour, I export a wav file only from the > 'jamin return' bus, which is reduced to 16-bit with a shaped noise > dither, ready for burning to CD in Gnome CD Master. See Quentin's > tutorial at: > > http://www.64studio.com/manual/audio/ardour/cdmarkers > > Cheers! > > Daniel I will use JAMin either way, to compress the stereo sum. JAMin is one of the best compressors I know, apart from the week point, the TerraTec sound card. The quality of the compression is as good, as the one of the best studio compressors I've heard (and I worked for Brauner), only the audio quality of my sound card isn't as good as studio tube compressors are ;), for home recording there isn't a better compressor. Hm, when working with 16-bits instead of more, than also the unneeded bits will be in the signal flow and take resources? At the moment I would prefer to record with Rosegarden, not only because of one window for all tracks. I will use Rosegarden with plugins and maybe QSynth too and by all means JAMin too, not only when doing the mastering, I'll use JAMin while composing and recording, not to record any thing by JAMin, but for the monitoring. Maybe I should use Ardour, to see if sync and jitter will be fine on my system. Soon or later I will have to use Ardour, because Rosegarden isn't really a hard disk recorder and as far as I have heard, Ardour has some of the functions I'm missing for Rosegarden, e.g. to mute single segments and maybe different pre-roll and punch functions. As wave editor I'm using Audacity. I can't say much about Audacity, but it seems to be fine for me. I don't let Jack force 16-bit, but I don't know how to make Rosegarden use 24-bit. I have forgotten to write that I not only will use Rosegarden with plugins, QSynth and JAMin, maybe I will use a reverb too and maybe Hydrogen too, that means Ardour will cause extra CPU load, that my CPU might not have. Cheers, Ralf
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