Bouncing tracks sonically inferior

[dts.music]

Doesn't sound as good as the original. Why?

[bearlyy]

I am a new user and I am having the same problem.
My session sounds perfect in Pro Tools but then when I create the wma file it sounds muffled.
Hopefully this is something to do with the settings.
Can anybody help with some guidelines.
Thanks

[spkguitar]

My session sounds perfect in Pro Tools but then when I create the wma file it sounds muffled.

You're creating a compressed audio file. That's what compressed audio files do.

For the best quality audio file, you should be bouncing to wav or aif.

[albee1952]

I always bounce my mix at the same sample rate and bit depth as the session(usually 44.1K and ALWAYS 24 bit unless I was given a 16 bit session to mix). Once I have a final stereo-interleaved file, I trim the ends of it, add a fadeout if needed and dither to 16 bit for CD burning. If I need mp3 versions, I do that with the final mixed file as well. I can tell you from experience that hard-limited mixes make for crunchy (aka BAD)sounding mp3 files. I know this sounds like extra steps but my finals always sound good(unless I mixed too hot) and just try to envision the old days of analog....what we have now is infinitely more convenient, no matter how we try to over-think or over-complicate things.

[tenchijin2]

1. make sure you're using a master fader in your session and that it's set to 0dB.

2. make sure you're bouncing to .wav or .aiff

3. if the track sounds muddy *IN ANOTHER ROOM* or *ON ANOTHER SYSTEM* then the issue is your monitoring/acoustical environment. It sounds good to you on your system because your acoustics suck and you can't actually hear what's happening. Then when you take it to another room, the acoustics are different and the mix sounds completely off.

The typical result in #3 is muddy, or boomy, or both. It's almost cliche how common it is.

[albee1952]

BTW, I never use a master track. Just another opinion.

[dividedsci]

The Flaming Lips have some good advice:

"Mixing and mastering the album brought Michael a useful and unexpected piece of wisdom. “We do all our recordings in high resolution, 24 bits, 88.2kHz,” he says. “When we export tracks, it seems like it’s easier on the computer to do the half calculation from 88.2kHz to 44.1kHz, as opposed to 96 down to 44 or whatever. So we thought, ‘We’re knocking down the bit depth and we’ve heard about this thing called dithering. Why don’t we do an experiment?’ For some reason, [every type of dithering we tried] affected the music and made it sound different. It was as though we put a BBE Aural Exciter on it. So when we export, we just do a simple rate conversion instead of doing the dither thing.”
Another discovery came when a mixed Lips track was listened to in two versions: The first one was bounced to disk in Pro Tools while the second was exported. Which sounded better to the band? “We actually wrote out a sticky note that said ‘Do not bounce ever"

You can read the whole article at this link:

Flaming Lips Interview

[bearlyy]

Thanks everyone for your input.

I bounced to wav - Stereo Interleaved, 44,100 Hz, 16 bit and it sounded fine for my purposes.

As suggested in
http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.p...=1#Post1244023

I will look into the other stuff mentioned later.

Mike.

[tamasdragon]

The Flaming Lips have some good advice:

"Mixing and mastering the album brought Michael a useful and unexpected piece of wisdom. “We do all our recordings in high resolution, 24 bits, 88.2kHz,” he says. “When we export tracks, it seems like it’s easier on the computer to do the half calculation from 88.2kHz to 44.1kHz, as opposed to 96 down to 44 or whatever. So we thought, ‘We’re knocking down the bit depth and we’ve heard about this thing called dithering. Why don’t we do an experiment?’ For some reason, [every type of dithering we tried] affected the music and made it sound different. It was as though we put a BBE Aural Exciter on it. So when we export, we just do a simple rate conversion instead of doing the dither thing.”
Another discovery came when a mixed Lips track was listened to in two versions: The first one was bounced to disk in Pro Tools while the second was exported. Which sounded better to the band? “We actually wrote out a sticky note that said ‘Do not bounce ever"

You can read the whole article at this link:

Flaming Lips Interview

Sorry, but this is one of the biggest [bleep] about digital conversion. Almost every src worth mentioning use highest common denominator, so calculation is not an issue here. The other is the bounce to disc. It was problematic long before, but now it's just as fine as any other method. This is proved by serious mastering engineers too. Sorry to say this, but these "wisdom" seems to me complete misinformation or the lack of knowledge. I don't want to bash anyone, but sometimes we should try to divide what we would like to beleive and what is really true.
Tamas Dragon

[jsmooth226]

and try setting the bounce resolution to tweakhead