Truth. Great advice NoAffiliation!NoAffiliation wrote: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
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.Mono-xID wrote: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.
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.
+1 to Creating a small test file and we can all listen and provide advice.Mono-xID wrote:I think the OP's problem is more a configuration problem rather than something like dithering.