I normally use the global editor for mastering track by track, but I’m doing a lot of tracks at the minute and dabbling in the montage for mastering. I’m wondering about bit resolution
For example, I have a 16bit pre-master, a 24bit premaster of 2 different tracks. When rendering them out in one montage, a) how do i render them all out at once as separate tracks (marker regions?), and b) how do I keep their original resolutions? they appear to be rendering out as 32bit?
Also if the montage renders out at 32bit, I’m guessing then I will need then need to further dither them for 24bit versions? thanks
The montage is bit-depth agnostic. If you load in a 16-bit file and do nothing, the audio will remain 16-bit. Any digital changes (gain change, plugin processing, fades, etc.) applied to a clip or audio will create floating point audio. 32-bit floating point or 64-bit floating point depending on your global WaveLab settings.
In the Render Ribbon Tab you can define some settings for when you render files. (See Attached)
In WaveLab you have to do two things:
- Apply a dither plugin to the desired bit-depth.
- Define the bit-depth of the result you’d like.
If you’re applying processing to the 16-bit and 24-bit files, there is no real need (in my opinion) to render them back to the native bit-depth because the digital processing increases the bit-depth to floating point. You can simply render them to a common bit-depth, or whatever is needed in the end.
There is a built-in bit-depth meter that you might find useful to show you what’s really going on.
In the Render Ribbon Tab you can choose to render each CD Track as its own file. If you really want to render them back to the native bit-depth, you’d have to render the files one at a time basically.
WaveLab can render a common bit-depth to render all CD Tracks as WAV files, or it can render to both 16 and 24-bit at the same time, but it has no way of automatically knowing the original bit-depth.
