Please! Help me with a Cool Edit Question!!!

[Chris Desjardin]

I know a lot of you use this software a lot, and I have learned a lot about it from this forum. But I am having a problem with working in 32 bit float. When I upsample my music to 32 bit 96K, everything seems fine (although it takes a long time to upsample). But after I do some processing such as EQ or click removal, the music actually plays at double speed. It makes it hard for me to see how the music sounds after i EQ it when it is playing double speed! Sounds like I am working on a Chipmunks album, which I am not. Other times I seem to lose all the data but a little bit. No matter where on the waveform I begin playing, it plays the same music. Have you experienced this at all?

I tried defragging my hard drive, but that didn't work. Since it takes me about 2 - 3 hours to upsample a long album, I hate to lose everything. I have done work with single tracks in 32 bit and it has worked fine, but now I am working on an entire album file. Could it be the file is now too big?

I am really getting frustrated, and look forward to any help you can offer. I am running Windows ME on a Pentium 3 866 mhz with 128mb RAM. I have a 40 gig hard drive with about 15 gig free space.

[Sckott]

"Adjust sample rate" from edit menu. If you upsample/downsample, you have to adjust your playback sample rate accordingly. Silly guy. :rolleyes:

[Chris Desjardin]

Thanks, Sckott! Duh! Silly guy, indeed! It never even occurred to me! To think of all the time I wasted!

[Grant]

Downsampling to 44.1 does more damage to your sound than bit-depth conversion.

[Chris Desjardin]

Grant,
So are you saying I should upsample to 32 bit, but keep it at 44.1K instead of going to 96K?

Why does it cause more degradation?

Just curious. I know you are a Cool Edit expert.

[Grant]

Originally posted by Chris Desjardin
Grant,
So are you saying I should upsample to 32 bit, but keep it at 44.1K instead of going to 96K?

Why does it cause more degradation?

Just curious. I know you are a Cool Edit expert. ;) If this is stuff from other CDs that you are working on, you gain NO benifit from upsampling to higher than 44.1. Upsampling has nothing to do with changing the bit-depth.

If you are just going to do simple editing (cutting), there's no need to convert to anything. If you plan on doing more, You could convert to 32-bit floating point. 32-bit float has an infinite dynamic range to work with. You might say that higher bit depths offer more real estate to work in so the word length doesn't get truncated while doing processing. You should use dither to go to 16-bit when done. This is for stuff you record yourself. BUT, most modern CDs have already dithered music. It's not a good idea to dither twice because it can cause the music to sound veiled. If you arew working with CD material, what you can do is:

1) Go to Settings/data and uncheck "Dither all tansforms", perform your processing all in 16 bit, save your file, then go back and check the "Dither all transforms".

2) Convert your music files to 32-bit float, process them, then convert back to 16-bit without dither ONLY if you know the music has already been dithered once.

It is probably best to just stay at 44.1 if you are dealing with CD or mp3. If you record at, 44.1 or 48kHz, don't bother going higher. It is a waste of time.