bumping this with a rookie question

i'm trying to get back into making music, starting with remixing my last album. I want to give AW a serious shot. My setup is this:

- reaper project
- bunch of (grouped) stems, all at 44.1khz 24bit

my question is this:
should i raise the sample rate of the project? Even if the stems themselves are 44.1, will a higher res make the Console and other AW plugins sound/blend better?

(PS: i'm sorry i haven't been around more. I miss yall, but when the forum went away I lost the habit of checking in... replaced it with twitter i guess )

Not an expert but I think it's suggested to leave the session at whatever the highest sample rate/word length you have in your files. The DAW is already doing floating-point calculations and knocking things back down to 24 bits before we hear them. I think if you go through the AW site you'll see references to certain plugins behaving differently at higher sample rates (ones based on convolution kernels and some others), but I don't think that's been the case for a long time.

I have just been doing some similar remix/reissue work, involving mixing some 44.1 stuff with AW plugins. It went fine!

44.1 & 24-bit is an absolutely fine setting for recording, probably more than most of us will ever need. I've done everything at this except when forced to 48k from recordings gleaned off my digital mixer which is also fine although rendering down to 44.1 for CD standard always makes me nervous (and yet still as close as I can possibly hear, I notice no real loss when doing this).

prowler wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 5:17 am bumping this with a rookie question

i'm trying to get back into making music, starting with remixing my last album. I want to give AW a serious shot. My setup is this:

- reaper project
- bunch of (grouped) stems, all at 44.1khz 24bit

my question is this:
should i raise the sample rate of the project? Even if the stems themselves are 44.1, will a higher res make the Console and other AW plugins sound/blend better?

(PS: i'm sorry i haven't been around more. I miss yall, but when the forum went away I lost the habit of checking in... replaced it with twitter i guess )

Go with 24/192 if you can. 24/96 is also great. This will minimise the chances of aliasing during processing with non-linear processes like saturation. Just the difference between 44.1 and 48 is stark to the human ear (it will present most usually as a difference in 3D/depth of the sound).

Even if the stems are 44.1, processing at the higher rate in your DAW will do wonders. It is basically a posh version of oversampling. Bit if you can record stems at 24/192 then go for it.

If your end-point file for delivery needs to be at a lower sample rate, then you should do that conversion in the export from your DAW. You will always need to add dither. Your DAW will do this automatically but Airwindows make a bunch of great ones. My fave is “Dark”. The trick is to turn dithering off in your DAW, and then place Dark at the very very end of your plug-in chain on your master buss (2buss).

Have fun!

I will say it can be worse to record at 192 and convert down to 44.1 0r 48 than to just record at those lower rates to begin with. If you are capturing at higher rates the ultra high frequencies are being re rendered to the lower rate and can cause some aliasing depending on what you are doing. If you record at 48K. absolutely nothing above 24Khz is captured because it eradicated by the anti-aliasing filter. I've seen it happen where a 96K file re-rendered to 48k has weird harmonics, usually caused by saturation FX. The Easy Fix was to take the 96K file out and recapture it at 48k instead of re-rendering it down.

Computers are weird.

thanks for the replies everyone. Rerecording isn't an option, but i will try to change the DAW rate and keep my ears peeled for said wonders

Just wanted to chime in: thanks to this thread, I started using airwindows on my Linux recording machine. It's become a necessary suite and there are some plugins that I just can't do without anymore.

The cheatsheet is really helpful. I wish the naming wasn't so esoteric, though I do find it charming. Next thing I want to learn is how to use the buss emulators.

cakes wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 10:32 am Just wanted to chime in: thanks to this thread, I started using airwindows on my Linux recording machine. It's become a necessary suite and there are some plugins that I just can't do without anymore.

The cheatsheet is really helpful. I wish the naming wasn't so esoteric, though I do find it charming. Next thing I want to learn is how to use the buss emulators.

Do you mean the summing systems like Console 7 etc., or standalone plugins like BusColors and Channel9?

seby wrote: Wed Jun 08, 2022 6:41 am

cakes wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 10:32 am Just wanted to chime in: thanks to this thread, I started using airwindows on my Linux recording machine. It's become a necessary suite and there are some plugins that I just can't do without anymore.

The cheatsheet is really helpful. I wish the naming wasn't so esoteric, though I do find it charming. Next thing I want to learn is how to use the buss emulators.

Do you mean the summing systems like Console 7 etc., or standalone plugins like BusColors and Channel9?

Which ever ones do coloring. Probably the latter!

cakes wrote: Wed Jun 08, 2022 2:12 pm

seby wrote: Wed Jun 08, 2022 6:41 am

cakes wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 10:32 am Just wanted to chime in: thanks to this thread, I started using airwindows on my Linux recording machine. It's become a necessary suite and there are some plugins that I just can't do without anymore.

The cheatsheet is really helpful. I wish the naming wasn't so esoteric, though I do find it charming. Next thing I want to learn is how to use the buss emulators.

Do you mean the summing systems like Console 7 etc., or standalone plugins like BusColors and Channel9?

Which ever ones do coloring. Probably the latter!

Chris is about to release Console 8!