Can I mix down to 32 bit at a higher sample rate than 44.1 kHz ?

Question

When I use Ableton Live, it lets me choose 16, 24, or 32 bit, and then I can choose a sample rate all the way up to 192000.  Is this possible in Audition ?  I have been going through all the preferences and all the tabs and I can't find this option.  All I find is a convert option, or the adjust option.  But that's not what I want.  I want to mix down this way.
The closest thing I found is when I go to "Export Audio Mix Down", I can select 32 bit.  Then there is a box for sample rate, with all the different values.  But it won't allow me to change it from 44100.

Answer 1

JimMcMahon85 wrote:
Can someone explain this process in laymens terms:
http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/OzoneDitheringGuide.pdf ---> specifically Section: VIII "Don't believe the hype"
I don't read graphs well, can someone put in laymens terms how to do this test, step by step, and where do i get a pure sinewave to import into audition in the first place??
UNbelievable: So I have to first run visual tests using a sinewave to make sure dither is working properly, then do listening tests with different types of dither to hear which I like best on my source material, and then for different source material it's best to use different types of dither techniques???... Am I getting this right???...
Hmm... you only need to run tests and do all that crap if you are completely paranoid. Visual tests prove nothing in terms of what you want to put on a CD - unless it's test tones, of course. For the vast majority of use, any form of dither at all is so much better than no dither that it simply doesn't matter. At the extreme risk of upsetting the vast majority of users, I'd say that dither is more critical if you are reproducing wide dynamic range acoustic material than anything produced synthetically in a studio - simply because the extremely compressed nature of most commercial music means that even the reverb tails drop off into noise before you get to the dither level. And that's one of the main points really - if the noise floor of your recording is at, say, -80dB then you simply won't be hearing the effects of dither, whatever form it takes - because that noise is doing the dithering for you. So you'd only ever hear the effect of LSB dither (what MBIT+, etc. does) when you do a fade to the 16-bit absolute zero at the end of your track.
Second point: you cannot dither a 32-bit Floating Point recording, under any circumstances at all. You can only dither a recording if it's stored in an integer-based format - like the 16-bit files that go on a CD. Technically then, you can dither a 24-bit recording - although there wouldn't be any point, because the dither would be at a level which was impossible to reproduce on real-world electronics - which would promptly swamp the entire effect you were listening for with its own noise anyway. Bottom line - the only signals you need to dither are the 16-bit ones on the file you use for creating CD copies. And you should only dither once - hence the seemingly strange instructions in the Ozone guide about turning off the Audition dither when you save the converted copy. The basic idea is that you apply the dither to the 32-bit file during the truncation process - and that's dithered the file (albeit 'virtually') just the once. Now if you do the final file conversion in Audition, you need to make sure the dithering is turned off during the process, otherwise all the good work that Ozone did is undone. What you need to do is to transfer the Ozone dithering at the 16-bit level directly to a 16-bit file proper, without anything else interfering with it at all. So what you do with Ozone is to do the dithering to your master file, and save that as something else - don't leave the master file like that at all. After saving it, undo the changes to the original, in fact - otherwise it's effectively not a file you could use to generate a master with a greater-than-16-bit depth from any more, because it will all have been truncated. Small point, but easy to overlook!
just what's the easiest way to test if a simple dithering setting is
working for 32-bit down to 16-bit in Audition?...  Why is there no info
about dithering from 32 bit to 16 bit (which is better then dithering
from 24-bit isn't it)?
I hope that the answers to at least some of this are clearer now, but just to reiterate: The easiest way to test if its working is to burn a CD with your material on it, and at the end of a track, turn the volume right up. If it fades away smoothly to absolute zero on a system with lower noise than the CD produces then the dither has worked. If you hear a strange sort-of 'crunchy' noise at the final point, then it hasn't. There is info about the 32 to 16-bit dithering process in the Ozone manual, but you probably didn't understand it, and the reason that there's nothing worth talking about in the Audition manual is because it's pretty useless. Earlier versions of it were better, but Adobe didn't seem to like that too much, so it's been systematically denuded of useful information over the releases. Don't ask me why; I don't know what the official answer to the manual situation is at all, except that manuals are expensive to print, and have also to be compatible with the file format for the help files - which are essentially identical to it.
Part of the answer will undoubtedly be that Audition is a 'professional' product, and that 'professionals' should know all this stuff already, therefore the manual only really has to be a list of available functions, and not how to use them. I don't like that approach very much - there's no baseline definition of what a 'professional' should know (or even how they should behave...), and it's an unrealistic view of the people that use Audition anyway. Many of them would regard themselves as professional journalists, or whatever, but they still have to use the software, despite knowing very little about it technically. For these people, and probably a lot of others, the manual sucks big time.
It's all about educating people in the end - and as you are in the process of discovering, all education causes brain damage - otherwise it hasn't worked.