Dubstepforum.com

Basically - I've started doin subs in my tune behind a bass.. I'm usin Fruit Loops 7 - When I render it to 320kbits or whatever bitrate it is - it completely changes the bass. Might be just a glitch in the software, but If you have a way of preventing this, please tell!

The first thing audiocompression does, is remove stuff in the frequencies on the limit of what we hear.

Try to generate a wav instead...

DITHERING: you need it.

FL Studio makes shite MP3's! I suggest exporting a wav then using soundforge or wavelab, etc to master then MP3 it.

TeReKeTe: could you explain what dithering is, and why we need it & most importantly what effect it has on bass?

Y u trying to bounce to mp3? U want to bounce it 2 wav

Dithering is digital noise used to make quantizing error sound less objectionable. Check the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering

^^^, fuck, that's a long, accurate, and no-fun description of dithering.

the in-practice cliffs:

#1, in general, but especially if you're recording any live instruments or hardware synths, you should be working at 24 bit resolution in your projects. the half-again-as much dynamic range will result in you getting punchier, brighter, 'cleaner' mixes with less effort.

(you should also use fairly low levels but that's beside the point)

#2, though you work in 24 bit, cds are pressed at 16 bits. this means that the last 1/3 of each bit of audio you've recorded is going to get chopped off once it's either burned to audio CD, or bounced out at 16 bits.

#3-- If you don't do something about this truncating of bits, you're going to get that horrible, underwater, warbly sound as sounds and reverb tails decay. That's not because you encoded a song w/ VBR, it's because of 'bit truncation.' What do you need to do? DITHER.

In adding dithering at the end of your mastering chain, or on your bounce/render, you're adding some nearly-impercievable noise to your track. This noise masks-- shapes, even-- that nasty sound into something musical.

as you can see from the wiki, there's a whole world of work on dithering. Right now, both apogee and POW-R make the most-used algorhythms, though if you're using the waves L2 or L3 , you can do dithering in there as well (apogee's is HR22 and is included w/ cubase/nuendo; POW-R is included w/ logic and peak). it's an extremely important part of getting a good sounding master.

Dithering is only relevant when reducing bit depths, not sample rate. Since mp3 is a 32-bit float format natively, you never have to lower your bit depth (or hence, dither) when encoding mp3s.

This is important to consider when mastering mp3's, since mp3 has a larger dynamic range than (16 bit) CDs, and can very realistically yield higher quality results than a CD master. As for sample rates though, lame is optimized for lower samplerates - 44.1kHz being the sweet spot.

Most likely, what you're hearing is a shitty mp3 export with possible bit or sample rate reduction first.

Try rendering a 32-bit WAV and use lame for encoding and see if there's a difference. Also listen to the exported WAV for comparison.

Cheers,
-d