How to prepare 16bit audio for 24bit PT session?

[Ruben_B]

Hi all,
on the odd occassion i will make up a drum loop in fruityloops or use a royalty free drum loop for some of my music. These files are all in 16bit and i find when i use them in a 24bit protools session it add some noise and more often than not i'll need to apply some Waves X-noise plugins. Just wondering if theres any way to save or convert these files to 24bit to use in my sessions. I saw in fruityloops theres the option of saving the file as a 32-bit floating but im not sure what that means.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

-Ruben

[Chris Cavell]

Do you think it might be possible that the noise is present in the original file, or that something else besides pro tools in your import procedure is affecting the sound of these files. Importing a 16 bit file into a 24 bit session shouldn't add any noise whatsoever.

[Ruben_B]

Hi Chris,
it is possible that the noise is present with the ready made drum loops but when i make my own in fruityloops i always make sure the levels areas good as possible and that the sound is clean. It just seems that when i import that loop into PT there is some background hiss present.
Thanks for the reply, i'll try some loops out tonight and see how i go. I've also tried loading the files into soundforge and converting them there to 24bit but with the same results.

[Chris Cavell]

Try and nail it down to a single source or process eliminating all other possibilities. Converting 16 to 24 bit simply adds 8 zeros to the end of every word. There really isn't anything going on (that I know of) that could potentially add noise that isn't already present.