Dithering is about bit depth, so you're talking about sampling rate.
That is true when you use plugins that produce heavy distortions that, at least temporary, exceed the maximum frequency allowed (half the sampling frequency aka Nyquist, 44->21, 96->48). The same plugins deal with that oversampling beore and downsampling it after so it's a transparent process.
Raising the whole project sampling rate has its cases I guess.

That's an excellent comparison. The "ladder effect" on low res images is an example. Antialiasing it's the resampling (downsampling in this case) equivalent, tough both processes are related in several cases.
In images dithering is done to simulate color depth that doesn't exist, just like bit depth. In every cheap magazine or just your printer when you print a photo dither is heavily used, since it's done tipically using only 4 colours and very limited depth. Though we could say the frequency sampling in printed images is humongous.

 

Last edited: Nov 14, 2019

24 bit wav should be dithered. Otherwise it will be truncated from your DAWs 32 or 64 bit float engine. You will not notice difference. But truncation is worse than dithering, with or without noise shaping. Dithering prevents truncation, not masks it. But if you already have 24 bit file truncated, it doesn't require any dithering anymore, because it is already truncated and it will be truncation+dithernoise, and nothing will be saved. From float, after all processing and limiter USE DITHERING.
Dithering always after SRC only.
Lossy files such as mp3 etc do not require dithering. Export from your 32/64 bit float.

 

reaper effects for mastering ? i don't know , i don't think so man. i use plugin alliance stuff for that.

 

Thank's for that link Talmi!

 

I need to learn more about dithering.
If I remixed and remastered an audiotrack on Adobe Audition at let's say 44100Hz/32bit Wav and wanted to finally convert it to MP3 44100Hz/320bit rate for listening to on my MP3 player, would I be better dithering it from 44100/32bit to 44100/16bit Wav first before converting it to MP3 for better sound or can I just convert straight to Mp3 without noticing much of a difference? Does it really matter?
This may be a noob question but I have to learn somewhere.
Cheers.

 

Again. Dithering doesn't work for mp3.
Render mp3 320 from 44100/32bit without dithering

 

No problem !

 

Cheers!

 

That's right, that's a common misconception. Dithering when only used to lower bit depth doesn't mask.
If it's used along with downsampling to simulate higher frequencies then it's a kind of masking. But I'm not sure in the audio department, I know about it when used with images.