Just a couple questions.

1) Do I only dither upon mastering final .wav file? If I send my mixdown to an engineer I do not dither correct?

2) When I master myself in fruity loops there is an option for dithering. If Ozone dithering is also checked as well as dithering in fruity loops does this double dithering cause problems? Do I leave izotope or fruity loops dithering enables or both for final output?

3) Any other relevant advice to a newbie about dithering would be helpful thanks.

 

It's advised to dither every time you go from a higher bitrate to a lower one. So if you don't stay in 32bit floating point all the time, you should dither every time you render/bounce something.

I'm not 100% sure on this one, but dithering twice in the same process (without changeing something in between) should create twice the dithering noise, so once should do the trick. (I'd guess both do basically the same but I think ozone has more options so if you read a bit about what those options do it's probably the better choice)

Dithering is really useful! And while this might sound a bit lazy, I'd advice you to just google a bit because there are probably several forum posts and/or tutorials that already have all the information (and more) than I could write right now.

 

this guy has some good tips

 

such great help and tutorials, thank you

 

I've always kept it simple. FL it one of my favorites, but I never "dither" using fruity. I stay at 24 bit, and bounce everything to 24 bit. Then, when I have a stereo master track with mixbuss compression, I bounce that down to 24 bit, load it into Adobe Audition, or Wavelab, start some sudo-mastering with plugs, apply those plug-in effects, fades, arrangement volume tweaks. When I'm done with all of that, I then render to 16/44.1 and apply dithering to a stereo wav file, and also an original 24 bit file, and some mp3 files at different kbps.

Stay with your 32bit through the entire process, until the end, and you'll be fine. I've never used dither options in plugins. Others' experiences may vary.

 

you should use dither only on 44.1kHz
if you work higher than 44.1 (for example 96), so mix and master it without limiter, then render your 96kHz -> convert with best-quality sample-rate converter SRC to 44.1 and then limiter, -0.3dB peak output and 16-bit dither with or without noise shaping. One of the best way.

 

Always render at 32bit/64bit floating point, either WAV or WavPack.
This ensures that all processing is done in 32bit depth and in floating-point domain so there's no clipping. With floating point you can go above 0dBFS without distortion and then just normalize before going to fixed-point PCM.
I'd advice not to use noise-shaping unless you're handling VERY dynamic material. With noise-shaping applied, every additional dithering produces more noise, that is added to total signal amplitude.
Dither should be applied when reducing bit depth (not bit rate!), not sample rate.

 

I used to dither a lot (for final export), but then I've pretty much stopped altogether.

Under sensible circumstances, if you have your gain-staging correct it's:

• Inaudiable
• Useless
  
• Self-defeating

It's also probably bad for lossy encoding since lossy encoders will attempt to smash your dither AND encode the additional noise remaining.

I' don't produce at an average level level of -90dB RMS, and neither do most movie studios (movies generally have lots more DR than DRC'd music on CDs). My target is -6dB clipping, and even I don't dither mostly nowdays. I don't know about you, but I do my dither tests at 16bit, not 5bit. Anything under 10bit you'll prolly need to dither. See if you can tell the dithered ones from the undithered ones in this set:

http://ethanwiner.com/lullaby.zip

I couldn't. So unless you produce at -90dB or can hear something 60-80dB below the noise floor, don't use dither.

PS: If you can hear dither at 16bit, something's wrong.

source: http://ethanwiner.com/dither.html

 

^^^ ye dis is tru, maybe it's just me but dithering feels useless to me and I can't really understand its purpose or effect, at least for what I do and what I'm usually involved in, I can't really see the use of its effects, hasn't really influenced my master at all...