Exporting Vs. Real Time Recording (Food for Thought)

[EminentAndrew]

My guitarist has this idea of taking the outputs of a my RME 800 and plugging them into the inputs of a Digi 003 and recording real time. It makes sense because your making one wave file without changing anything or losing anything through an export. But the question is, does bouncing somehow sync everything up and make it sound better? Especially using a great quality interface like the RME 800. My concern would be that playing 25 tracks at once can cause a computer to playback a little off time. What are your thoughts on this? Should I export or should I record the playback?

[larry b]

A lot of people around here are quite leery of the "bounce to disk" no matter what DAW is discussed. I think the vast majority of professional mixers who work ITB either print their mixes to an external master recorder of some sort, or in the absence of one, will print back into the DAW via a pair of inputs.

There is inherently something added to the signal by passing through additional analog stages as well as an additional instance of d/a and a/d conversion if mixing down digitally, or at least d/a if mixing down to an analog format.

As to exactly how much of a difference this makes, it depends on your analog equipment, audio interface, conversion, etc.

With that said, you should do a comparison. First bounce your mix to disk directly, and then re-record it back into the DAW via analog in/outs. Listen. What do you hear? Any differences?

There's your starting point....

[EminentAndrew]

BUMP

[Mark III]

Did you try what was suggested above then?? ......Whats better to you...not what anyone else thinks.



Cheers.

[rack gear]

Originally Posted by larry b

A lot of people around here are quite leery of the "bounce to disk" no matter what DAW is discussed. I think the vast majority of professional mixers who work ITB either print their mixes to an external master recorder of some sort, or in the absence of one, will print back into the DAW via a pair of inputs.

on my more important mixes I print back into the DAW and monitor from those returns.

I think it could be simply, that anything that changes in the signal path, changes the signal - for better or worse, or by small or large is dependent on those changes.

I run a lot of mixes though my Culture Vulture as the last step and back into the machine to soften and warm the digital signal.

A lot of times, on demos, etc - I'll just export/bounce to disc... I was very skeptical of bouncing to disc, having always printed to DAT in the past.

It sounds different - better/worse? dunno. How big of a difference? Well for me not big enough to print to DAT anymore.

But when I do want to add something special to a final mix, I'll print back in the DAW adding not only the Culture Vulture, which also adds another round of DA/AD...

The mastering studios I use send all the mixes from a MAC PT HD rig analog via converters to a PC running wavelab... inbetween the mac and the PC is the outboard gear - compressors, Eq's...

I've heard that Daniel Lanois still mixes analog to DAT clocked at 16bit/44.1 and monitors from the DAT deck, because "that's what CDs are"... so then the DAT goes to mastering...