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Hi Consultation and advice needed! Im finishing my mixes and preparing them for pro mastering. My first album is on it's way! One issue arrived: The master engineer to whom I will send it requires 24 bit depth files. Now situation in all my project is this: Some tracks were recorded in 24/48 and others in different time and place were recorded in 16/41 and in the end all recordings ended mixed in projects with default 16/41 Now I wonder if that might be a problem... Question nr1: What Cakewalk does when its feeded with audio files of a different bit depth and sample rate? (knowing that default for all projects is 16/41) Does it automatically applies dithering when going down from 24 to 16? What about sample rate? Question nr2: What now, when sending for mastering (24 bit depth required) - render them in 16(project bit depth)and convert to 24, or render straight to 24? I have 2 weeks to sort it out before deadline. Thanks in advance for your time and help

Hi, I'm completely new to this community and forum, so thanks in advanced for taking the time to read this. I've hit a wall with my Cakewalk progress and I cannot seem to find a solid or straightforward answer to an issue I have, even after hours of looking. Basically, I am at a stage where I am ready to export my project as a WAV file. Within the Export Audio screen, I have set the Sample Rate at 48k, as this is what the project was set to within preferences (48k was chosen due to track eventually being used with a video). However, when it comes to choosing the Bit Depth within the Export Audio screen, I’m completely stuck. I initially thought there was only one place you set the bit depth for a project and it was within "driver settings" within preferences (much like the sampling rate I have just mentioned). However, I discovered yesterday that there are 3 different instances where bit depth can be set within a project which are as follows: Audio Driver Bit depth within driver settings (this is fixed at 24 bit for me due to the ASIO I assume) Record Bit Depth within preferences > Audio Data (this is set to 16 bit which is a shame because everything already recorded is now at 16 bit and not 24, but at least I will know for next time) Render Bit Depth within preferences > Audio Data (this is set to 32 bit). So my question is: which one of these do I go off to know if I need to apply dithering or not when exporting the track? How do I know if I am exporting the project / track at a lower bit rate to what it is set to? So should I export at 16 bit (as that’s what the tracks are recorded at)? Or should I export at 24 bit (as that is what the audio driver is set to). Or, should I export to 24 bit and apply dithering because the Render Bit depth is set at 32? Are elements of my project going to be at 32 bit due to this, meaning if I export to 24 bit without applying dithering, I could get unwanted artefacts or a bad sound? So I really don't know what to go off for this, or how to make a decision on what to do or select on the export process. I hope this all makes sense and I would be very grateful of and explanation of these different bit depths and which one I should be looking at and / or go off to resolve the problem just described. Thanks Again and Kind Regards.

We have noticed some strange behaviour with Sonar Bandlab lately on large projects with lots of audio files. Corrupt audio files, corrupt audio regions replaced with silence, clicks which appear from nowhere usually around the same point in the timeline etc. These problems are particularly bad when we would take a project home from the studio to listen to it or vice versa. In other words these errors would not occur on the PC we were copying the project from, only when they were played on a different one! Then all these error messages would start appearing and Sonar Bandlab could not see the missing audio files in the audio folder even though Windows Explorer could. Eventually we figured it out. We had the dithering setting in preferences switched to POWR-3 in the preference settings. Changing it to "None" had an instant effect. All the projects now open with no errors. Also we noticed that if we tried to change the audio format in the project files then Sonar Bandlab would just close! Disabling dithering in this sub menu also solved this problem. There were really a lot of issues caused by this Dithering setting being switched on in the preferences. Any ideas what the reason is for Dithering causing such widespread errors or should we just have had it switched off from the start?