Metering and bit depth selection issues

BERNARD-HULL wrote on 2/5/2019, 6:58 PM

I've been using Sound Forge Pro for many years and recently upgraded from v10 to Sound Forge Pro 12. I've found the new version clumsy by comparison. Every time I open a new file that has a different bit depth to what is already open, I have to create a new, blank file first, then select the bit depth before I can load the new file. Or else, close all the open files first. Not good if you want to jump from one song to another for comparison if their properties are different. Sound Forge Pro 10 never had to do that. It would just set the parameters to match whatever I opened. Please fix that issue. Also there seems to be a difference in the metering. The Standard stereo meter on the right of the screen shows that the song I'm working on at the moment peaks at -0.6dB (the hardware meters tell me the same thing). However the True peaks (dBFS) meter says it's peaking at +0.5. Which is it? Or are they telling me two different things? It's a 32bit file if that means anything. I'm running Windows 10 (with the latest updates), RME Fireface UCX audio interface, Intel Core i7-33770K @ 3.5GHz, 32 MB RAM and multiple disc drives.

Comments

rraud wrote on 2/6/2019, 11:02 AM

SF works on floating point 32 bit basis. Since the file is 32 bit already, that may have something to do with it. I have never encountered a 32 bit file unless it was saved that way by mistake.

The true peak factor is intersample and can be different from standard full scale (dBFS) peaks. I usually use a limiter that catches these... many limiters do not have that resolution (though an occasional over even on a 16 bit files is normally not audible).

I'll check out the different bit depth file issue when I get to my PC with Pro 12.

BERNARD-HULL wrote on 2/6/2019, 3:36 PM

Thanks for the info on the meters. I too use a brick wall limiter set to around -0.5dB or so as well. The particular file I was working with yesterday had one on the final master bus set to -0.6dB. When I mix down multi-track recordings in my DAW (Sonar Platinum), having recorded each track in 24bit, I figure that getting the final mix as 32bit is likely to be more accurate (smaller sampling errors) than 24 bit (or 16) and potentially easier maths (or maybe not) to ultimately resample to 16bit (seeing as it's divide by 2 not 1.5) before putting the tracks on a CD. That's my theory anyway. In fact Sonar can produce 64bit audio files and my A-D converters can do anything up to 192KHz sampling rate but that's probably getting carried away with rather large files sizes. You can certainly hear the difference between 16 and 24 bit when it comes to multi-tracking. So, even if I was to mix down to 24bit files, Sound Forge would still have the same issue - which it never did have in version 10. No doubt opening files with different sampling rates would also be an issue with v12.