[LAU] Track bouncing

[Steve Fosdick]

On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 13:47 +0300, Arda Eden wrote:
> Sorry if this is discussed before but,
> 
> Some DAW software can bounce mixdown to an output file directly (like
> cubase or reason).
> But many audio people claim that this kind of bouncing is not good at
> all. They say that bouncing real-time
> (like with protools or by routing all the tracks to a new stereo
> track's input) is better resulting for audio quality.
> 
> Now,
> My consideration is that, there should be no difference between the
> two because theoretically the software
> should be writing the same data in both ways.

I suspect the idea that high speed copying results in a reduction in
quality comes from the days of analogue tape.

With a digital workstation, as long as all processing modules use the
correct sample clock, i.e. don't refer to any real-time hardware timers,
the result should be identical regardless of whether the speed is "real
time" or "as fast as possible".

If the output is to a non-compressed format, like normal .wav files you
could probably event run a side by side test and find that the 'cmp'
command finds the files absolutely identical.

Regards,
Steve.