good evening,
i have a Motu 896mk3 and drivers are old, for w8.
So Motu explain to me that the audio window parameter on windows 10 show only 16 bit but no problem, we can change that to 24 bits on Daw.
Yes but Dorico don’t give us this possibility.
Will you change this or must i buy an other audio card ?
Regards,
Thierry
How do you use your MOTU card. If only to connect your MIDI Kbd to the computer, simple MIDI-to-USB cables exist on Amazon. If you use the card for DOrico sound output, then you may have to find an auxiliary or replacement solution, as I doubt Dorico will move backwards into 16-bit.
593 / 5 000
it’s a sound card that I use to get out of Dorico to hear, work and make bounces. I’m not looking to go back to 16 bit, I prefer 24 bit. I would just like to have the choice in Dorico’s settings to set it to 16 or 24 bits. for the moment there is not this choice and I suppose that in absence of choice, it is 16 bits by default… I use Vienna Ensemble Pro with an orchestral config so I need to set my plug-ins to 24 bit to hear well. 24-bit bounce is not enough for me, I need to work in 24-bit Sincerely, Thierry
There is no GUI for changing it, but you should be able to modify it via a config file.
While Dorico is not running, go to C:/Users/yourname/AppData/Roaming/Steinberg/Dorico 5 AudioEngine_64
and look for the file Defaults.xml. Open that file in a text editor like Notepad and find the section which reads like following:
-<item>
<string name="Group" value="AudioSystemSettings"/>
-<member name="Values">
<inst name="ProcessingPrecision" value="32"/>
</member>
</item>
Change the value for the ProcessingPrecision to 24, save the file and then start Dorico.
That seems a little strange to me, Ulf. In other Steinberg software there is a “Processing Precision” setting that refers to the internal plugin processing precision, not the bit depth for the actual audio, and my understanding is that you normally want the internal processing precision to be much higher than the audio bit depth. For example:
That’s what I would expect Processing Precision to mean in Dorico as well. It would not make sense to me for Dorico to use the same term to mean something completely different than the other Steinberg software. If it does mean the same thing as in the other Steinberg software, you probably won’t want to decrease it to 24 bit. Often it is even increased to 64 bit from 32 bit.
Dorico’s audio engine is derived from Cubase and therefore uses the same term.
Yeah but that’s what I’m not understanding.
I believe that the Cubase “Processing Precision” setting is not what the original poster wants to change:
This is the Processing Precision setting in Cubase, as you can see, you can only choose 32 bit or 64 bit - 24 bit is not a valid option for precision.
In Cubase, there is a separate dialog box for setting the audio bit depth for the project:
I believe it is that setting that the original poster is looking for the equivalent of in Dorico to change to 24 bit, and not the Processing Precision.
The dialog is explained in the manual here: Project Setup Dialog
It’s possible I’m mistaken but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 24-bit option in the processing precision drop down on any system with Cubase.
I’m actually not sure whether or not it makes sense to change the equivalent of Cubase’s “Record File Format” settings in Dorico because Dorico can’t record audio to my knowledge, so it should not matter theoretically whether it is set to record audio in 16-bit or 24-bit if it cannot record audio in the first place. But I’ve never seen another location in Cubase where you can change bit depth between 16 bit and 24 bit, and I’ve used it for many years.
On the other hand, the sound properties dialog in Windows itself has a drop down where I am able to choose 24 bit instead of 16 bit. This is how it looks with my RME audio card:
I wonder if the original poster’s is set to 16 bit in this dialog box instead and the MOTU support did not know how to change this in the Windows sound properties. (Mine was originally 16 bit as well, until I changed it in this drop-down list a long time ago). I don’t think this dialog box has much practical impact though, it will probably just make you hear windows alerts like dinging sounds in 24 bits instead of 16-bits.
I suspect there may not even be a problem here - the OP said that the tech support showed that some kind of “diagnostic” indicated the audio interface was in 16-bit, but I think that is just showing the Windows audio setting which controls the playback quality for built-in sound playback for system alerts, and Dorico is doubtless using higher already.
Either way, I don’t think decreasing the processing from 32-bit to 24-bit is what the original poster wanted. They want the quality to go up from 16-bit to 24-bit, not down from 32-bit to 24-bit. I think the quality is probably actually higher than 16-bit right now in Dorico, but they are worried it might only be 16-bit, and I think the MOTU support may have given wrong information that has confused things.
mducharme have exactly understood what i mean 
so, does Dorico use 16 or 24 bits per default for playing vsti ?
i know there is 24 bit option for bouncing but this is not my question.
My question is " for playing vsti and plug-ins" in real time.
Regards,
Thierry
I believe the answer you are looking for is the internal processing precision is 32-bit, so you have 32-bits of headroom for the VE Pro processing.
Otherwise, I believe the 24-bit thing would only come into play if Dorico was itself recording audio files. If it is not recording audio, any sound should be played back at the recorded bit depth. Dorico is currently not capable of recording audio, so the only place the bit depth could possibly be specified is on export. There doesn’t seem to be a bit depth setting for any audio interfaces, other than what is specified for recording purposes. It doesn’t seem to be like the sample rate where the card actually gets set to the sample rate - so you can’t really configure the “bit depth” for the actual audio interface like you can the sample rate. This seems to be a universal thing, across all DAWs and audio interfaces.
I know this was undoubtedly a premium interface when you purchased it, but it was also released in 2008… so it’s not really surprising that it is finally no longer playing nicely with modern computers. The drivers aren’t being updated because it is 15 years old. That’s an eternity in the tech world, so it’s probably time to get a new interface, painful as that may be.
(FWIW, I know the pain; I had to abandon my previous interface two years ago for the very same reason, and, sadly, I couldn’t afford one that had full feature parity with my previous version, which had 10 physical I/O ports.)
Romano:
with a new sound card, the problem still exist in dorico
mducharme : thank you for your answer 
If you get a new card that has proper controller software and you use that driver rather than the windows generic driver, then your problem should go away.
Maybe you’d have some luck with flexASIO?
ok thank you Romano, i have seen ESI MAYA 44 eX, i will try …there is Asio2
Hi @Michael Ducharme, of course you are right with that what you are saying, my confusion on this topic, i apologize to everyone here
