Ableton: Export Audio sounds muffled HELP!!!

[hydrogen]

can you post audio examples?

what settings are you exporting at? you need to dither if you're rendering anything below 32 bit. i always monitor through a plugin on the master which is dithering the signal in real time. I think protools and some other DAW actually have dithering built into the mixer

you also might be getting aliasing artifacts which become more apparent when hard written into an audio file.

open a blank live session at 96khz, drop one of your tracks on and audio channel and create a spectrum analyzer device and see how much spectral content you are generating outside the band limit. this will cause all types of inharmonic artifacts in the lower frequencies and generally make everything sound like sh!t

Truth. Great advice NoAffiliation!

Also i spoke to a Mastering Engineer who told me that dithering is the last step after mastering. Even the guy in your link says it's just his opinion and not a fact nor it's a must.
I think the OP's problem is more a configuration problem rather than something like dithering.

Your mastering engineer is correct. but so is no affiliation. Dithering is last step when bringing an audiofile from 32/24bit to 16bit. Ableton always works in 32bit float. regardless of the incoming signal. So if you render to 24 or 16 bit without dithering you are doing it wrong.

I always render 32bit and then dither in my mastering stage(r8brain or mbit+). This is recommended in the live manual.

Another piece of advice... make sure you go in and set your record settings to at least 24bit or 32bit audio.

All in all, I do have a difficult time believing an obvious muffled sound is caused by any of this.

I think the OP's problem is more a configuration problem rather than something like dithering.

+1 to Creating a small test file and we can all listen and provide advice.

[Rein]

are you sure you've disabled "warping" your audio file?

because even when the bpm of the ableton project matches the bpm of the audio file, it can distort (sort of glitch in ableton, it tries to warp without warping being needed).

dithering is highly unlikely the cause of your problem. because you record external gear, you already have some noise in your recording. dithering is more crucial when you have a digital recording with some really quiet passages... what dithering does is adding a noise floor to your file, so you remove glitches (plops and clicks) caused by audio going to -inf at another point than the zero crossing point.

[steevio]

are you sure you've disabled "warping" your audio file?

exactly what i was thinking

[NoAffiliation]

i don't always do the double dither thing, not sure that's super important. muffled is also not the word i would use to describe quantize distortion

24 bit you can add dither many times with no problems because of the noise floor.

basically anytime there is quantize distortion you should dither.

the thing about dither that most people don't get is that it's not just noise to mask errors, it's mathematically correlated noise that REMOVES the quantize error, not just masking it. it's a pretty deep and interesting subject in itself

soon as you make a gain change on a 24 bit file in your DAW it's 32 or 64 bit depending on the program. you would be amazed to know how many of your plugins are actually dithering behind the scenes.

also makes sense to run dithering on the master while working, most limiters have it. your DAW is sending a 32 bit value to your converters, in this case the quantize distortion happens in the converter itself instead of it being written into an audio file. nonetheless you want to make sure your DAW is sending your converter the right signal or you will run into problems

[AK]

How does this relate to someone who doesn't use 'Render'? I just record into Wavelab at 24/44.1

[::BLM::]

i have never used the dithering option when bouncing down out of ableton, but am willing to give it a try. what option should i choose then if i'm recording at 24?

rectangular
triangular
pow 1
pow 2
pow 3

??

[Rein]

there is no best dithering mode, depends on what you want or need... try a little google search on dithering / dithering modes.

sadly, i really don't think this dithering thing will fix your problem tho...

[iquar]

Yes I do same as said before, modulars loops recorded in ableton are not equal to the source just passing trough ableton.
Even in 96k.
When recording sounds of my modulars into ableton, I got a clear degradation. It is more like : all the good things are removed. The deep basses, de smooth variations, etc.
So I use Soundforge for recording.

I posted on the Ableton Forum about that, go post too. It s too bad quality recording and exporting. Something is bad in their program.