Hey there, can any of you ableton pro's tell me the best settings for exporting a track from ableton.

dithering options(good/bad/which option?)

normalizing(good/bad?)

bit depth and sampling(ever necessary for more than 16bit 44100hz?)

thanks in advance

ok i know its not as fun as argueing about hardware synths vs software synths, but can anyone give me the low down?

dithering : don't touch this unless you're completely finished with your track (so you're doing the mastering in ableton)

dithering converts a higher bitrate to a lower one by adding noise so you should avoid this in your process unless you want to burn your track to cd.

normalizing: increases the volume of your track, you can put this on if you like, but I like having some room for compressing and mastering, which I don't do in ableton.

bit depth and rate: I'd say if you do heavy editing after you export there might be a point of exporting to 24 bit, if you don't, just export to 16 bit. Even then, unless you're doing classical music and you need a huge dynamic range, chances are very high you're never going to hear the difference anyway.

basically bit depth gives you more headroom to work with since there's more digital information

I wouldn't bother going higher than a 44khz, just a waste of harddisk space for me.

Bit depth and sample rates are overrated

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Yes i agree with dezma i only do 16 bit unless your record label says other wise but. But if they do you can just go back and export at a higher rate.

Remember cd is only 44100hz anyway.

can someone explain to me why you would want to leave headroom for mastering? i have never understood this. if it is in 32bit float, it should be irrelevant? i mean, if you leave headroom, then you must boost back up to 0db (SNR loss). conversely, if your signal was already close to 0db, you wouldnt have to boost it so much.

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm can someone explain to me why you would want to leave headroom for mastering? i have never understood this. if it is in 32bit float, it should be irrelevant? i mean, if you leave headroom, then you must boost back up to 0db (SNR loss). conversely, if your signal was already close to 0db, you wouldnt have to boost it so much.

You mean that you can always just lower the volume anyways ?

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quote:

Originally posted by Subtle You mean that you can always just lower the volume anyways ?

yes

My humble opinion is, that if you export too loud, mastering engineer puts on a compressor, it will clip...if it clips the information in the clipping "area" are lost.

If you have lower volume master, you can do everything you need with less chance of clipping...

If you have clipped track, the informations aren't there...so you can't do anything.

with lower volume you get worse SNR but you can always boost the volume up (and the digital information are there).


hope you understand me :/

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Because I have the labels' engineers do the mastering for my tunes, I typically use the following settings when exporting my unmastered waves in Live:

-No dithering
-44,100hz
-24bit
-No normalizing


And, if anyone is interested:

-Master peaking around -3dB
-Approx. 2 seconds of silence before and after song
-Nothing (limiter, compressor, EQ, etc.) on the master channel

Nuh uh!

Export as high quality as you can.

Yes, it's a waste of HD space but if you're going to be manipulating the end result, and even if you're converting it down from 96 khz to 48/44 khz, you're going to get a better quality conversion than if you just render at 44 khz.

quote:

Originally posted by BOOsTER My humble opinion is, that if you export too loud, mastering engineer puts on a compressor, it will clip...if it clips the information in the clipping "area" are lost. If you have lower volume master, you can do everything you need with less chance of clipping... If you have clipped track, the informations aren't there...so you can't do anything. with lower volume you get worse SNR but you can always boost the volume up (and the digital information are there). hope you understand me :/

why would a compressor cause it to clip? that doesn't make any sense, so it must be another reason. compressors lower the peaks, then you use the gain adjust to bring the whole signal up.

you would lose a lot more quality compressing from -3db peaking than 0db peaking - an extra 3db gain.

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm can someone explain to me why you would want to leave headroom for mastering? i have never understood this. if it is in 32bit float, it should be irrelevant? i mean, if you leave headroom, then you must boost back up to 0db (SNR loss). conversely, if your signal was already close to 0db, you wouldnt have to boost it so much.

Its a decent question, someone might have a better explanation, but ill try.
Its better to leave headroom because the ME will need to add gain to the mix when compressing the mix anyways, if there is no headroom they wont have much space to add compression properly. While mastering you dont want to bring the main level down furthur and also attempt to compress. Also some frequencies might be weak and the mastering engineer might want to add, if you dont have the headroom it will be hard to eq in frequencies boosts. Very much mixing 101, im guessing 70-80% of bedroom producers still havent found out about leaving -6db to -12db of headroom if they are using a DAW to produce.

Mr. Robert Babicz says leave -6dBfs of headroom.

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