Forum of music lovers

I like how nobody wants to tell him. That's perfect - just leave him wondering.

Or, somebody should just mess with the guy and tell him it’s this group from Japan:

Svetonio posting Breakfast In America in the perfect album thread.

Ooof.

I love music like the kind being discussed below.

SoX is pretty straightforward. The only caveat is that noise shaping, desirable, must be specified when doing bit conversions (with -s).

sox 24bit.wav -b 16 16bit.flac dither -s

The default shaper is "shibata" (except when not 44.1 or 48 it reverts to TPDF dither), a reasonable choice.
Audacity uses SoX libraries, and in high-quality export to 16 bit, "shaped" instead appears to be lipshitz.

I re-created graphs showing the noise profile of shapers (along with 10Hz @ -140dB = last bit of 24 bit audio, which can still be seen in quiet noise shaping). Link: i.imgur.com/wurR58w.png

Here's a longer example to shrink your hi-res FLAC. Enforcing an output sample rate (resample if necessary), slight volume reduction, specifying a shaping filter, and dithering to only 18 bits of audio data (in a 24 bit output file):

sox hi-res.flac -b 24 -r 48k goodenough.flac gain -0.1 dither -f gesemann -p 18

Note that the output file options come before the output file name. After the file name is the processing (which is aware of those options).

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One interesting thing I found while profiling is that the A-Weighting curve is far more sensitive to near-ultrasonic shaped dither than our ears, giving the better shapes worse specs. If the target is not your speakers, but rather instrumentation, there may be a different shaping filter to choose for the application.

[​IMG]

The intensity of dither was removed as a SoX option, along with rectangular distribution. A full bit of dither is used. However, just 0.85-0.95 bit will usually push non-harmonic quantization power from non-safe tones below the noise.

'However, just 0.85-0.95 bit will usually push non-harmonic quantization power from non-safe tones below the noise.'

I hope they wear the correct personal protective equipment. You don't want to be fucking around with non-safe tones.