PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows 16bit 44.1khz vs 24bit 48khz Audio

This guy is talking blasphemy, he says computers are are fast enough and storage is big enough these days to handle greater than 44.1khz.
Using 48khz 24bit that's crazy man talk, isn't it ?
He says you are future proofing yourself using 24/48
Most people here using the 16/44.1 Audiophile version and the BiabVST have slow old hardware from the 90's don't they ?
PG said that 44.1khz 16bit is fine that's all you need.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-H_5Sx-sMA

I think the very first user request after the Audiophile version was released was, can we please get it in 24-bit?

I'm not so concerned over the 48K sampling since I don't do video but I wouldn't turn it down, nor a higher rate format if offered. One consideration would be to keep the size of supplied drives down, but that's another discussion with another set of variables.

I watched the video, and I believe that I understood the content and the intent, but I don't follow why you suggested that he 'is talking blasphemy' (presuming you used it in the sense of an insult that shows contempt, disrespect). Could you clarify that part for me please?

The video popped up in youtube so I watched it and fell off the floor
It's everything that I have posted soooo many times for sooo long but I just feel the clinging on to old ways gets in the way of it all.
The moto is PG users have very old hardware therefore we cannot develop technology beyond their limitations, hence the guy is being blasphemous
You watched the video and understood the content and the intent, NOW get through to PG that he is really not being blasphemous do some study on your Audiophile and post some info showing PG how it can be done and work out the hard drive size needed and whether they could use wavpack instead of wav to get the same quality but a smaller size, because they may listen to you rather than me because I nag too much and they get sick of me and ignore me, but you guys are nice and polite and could explain it in a gentle way
You guys need to go through all the posts and study, try it all out and experiment that's how you can give helpful development info, it's too hard for me to keep doing it all, I get burn out

I remember the massive long forum topics on 64bit that they were saying that Jbridge is fine there is no need for 64bit no matter how many users said no they wanted 64bit. Then of course they were forced to 64bit when apple band all 32bit apps.
Hence the mentioned future proofing.
He is stating the obvious but but the feeling I get from here is "oh no we don't need to do that it, it's fine for the home hobbyist".
Like that guys not a home hobbyist, he knows what he is talking about.

If the Audiophile was 48khz 24bit and the BiabVST worked with instant play/gen how much more would it be used in a professional studio environment ?
It's the same deal with fake time signatures.

It's like so called misinformation & disinformation that's all turning out to be true yet people were cancelled by the "Ministry of Truth" getting on to twitter, facebook and youtube to get them to cancel these users accounts.

I saw this a few days ago and he makes a pretty good sensible argument for going 48k 24 bit. My main interest was that I purchased an iPad Pro recently to take away on a trek and allow me a reasonable device for generating music. I was a bit surprised to find it will not allow 41.1k at all. It defaults to 48k 24 bits.

I’ve seen a number of arguments over the years but the general consensus these days seems to be 48k as more services are trending default to this now. It is after all the video standard. I found his discussion on 96k interesting but most discussions on 96k seem to agree that there is little advantage for most genres.

Just some observations.

Tony.

I don’t think that’s true at all. Can you give an example where the company said that? But I don’t know what ‘Moto’ means to you.

And there have been recent discussions with the developers about how best to deliver a large amount of large files, with alternatives. The discussions have been polite and we expect them to be productive.

FWIW, I took "talking blasphemy" as irony.

For some the following will be obvious, for others it may be informative.

There are so many layers to the digital audio cake that it's very difficult to give a definitive answer, though I certainly agree that 24bit 48k is probably the minimum we should really be working with. I'd always rather downscale than upscale at the final cut.

Where the definitive bit gets particularly tricky is that the data is not the only factor. Another very significant factor is the behaviour of the convertors to and from analogue. The root cause of the differences at this point are due to the way real sound and the digitisation process can interact. Specifically, if one has an audio sound at, say, 40kHz, it's well outside of the range of most people's hearing, but it you sample that sound, whether at 44.1kHz or 48kHz, you will get an interference signal from it right smack in the middle of the audible bandwidth. A similar but usually less serious issue arises at conversion back to analogue.

The analogue to digital conversion must filter out any signals like that before taking the samples. The problem that then arises is that filters themselves also affect the sound and the harder one makes the filters work to stop those unwanted frequencies, the more the effects of the filter itself become audible.

The faster one can sample, the less severe those filters have to be, so a 192kHz sample rate will be cleaner than a 96kHz sample-rate will be cleaner than a 48kHz sample rate. However after that point, downscaling the faster rates to 48kHz should make no real difference to the content.

When comparing 96kHz to 48kHz the question then arises "what causes any difference to which you are listening ... the sample-rate or the filter?" (or indeed the expectation). And unless one can answer that, the comparison is of dubious value.

Any time we manipulate the content of the data stream we degrade the signal a little. Our DAWs probably work 32-bit float, which helps to minimise that, but it would seem a great shame to tie the output from the DAW to 16bit 44.1kHz before sending it for a final mixdown. That's about as low a quality as one would want to go, but the mix guy will manipulate it further.


There are occasional threads about support of FLAC audio files. FLAC would allow 24bit 48kHz data to be compressed to a similar size to 16bit 44.kHz WAV, so media size should not be an issue. Old computers might be, though increasingly less so I would have thought.

I doubt very much that that statement is absolutely correct. I am certain that minimum system requirements have not remained static and are continually updated. This is clearly reflected in their own literature. If I can reasonably interpret 'very old hardware' then that would not meet this criteria.

Just a question if I may: How familiar are you with the input from the forum members SolidRock and Pipeline? Both of whom contributed valuable input to the forums. Please share.

I agree, but I do note that PGM try very hard to maintain a direct compatibility with version from many years ago and I think that ties their hands (or at least they perceive that it does).

I commend them for that, but also feel that there are ways and means to decouple from what has become a bit of a straitjacket.

"FWIW, I took "talking blasphemy" as irony."

Thanks you get it !

Guys you can't see the forest because of the trees, don't focus on the digs and humor, moto, that is just a bit of satire, focus on the actual issues.


This was suggested for the BiabVST and most of them would be on high end DAWs.
Though there is no reason why it would not work for Biab as Reaper will play Biab files or 48/24 in realtime on WinXP off a USB 2.0 hard drive and it did that back in 2006, plays fine on a 1.9GHz Celeron Win7 laptop with a 5400rpm HD.
Biab now has Util tracks that play 16 wav files back direct from hard drive, I think it was even converting them to 32bit.
The guys over at reaper spent a little bit of time and made reaper play back wma files direct, Biab could do that also I would of thought.

Just a question if I may: How familiar are you with the input from the forum members SolidRock and Pipeline? Both of whom contributed valuable input to the forums. Please share.

I just hope it's well thought out to future proof things, like multichannel file formats for compressed and Audiophile that supports more than 10channels. That will be the same type compatible on Win and Mac.

I took the 10 16bit 44.1khz wav files in the Realdrums folder and encoded them to 24bit 48khz multichannel wavepack file that injects directly into Reaper.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vt2bg5l614g8nx7/BB-Wavepack-Multichannel-Drums.mp4?dl=0

See in pic below file size of the 10 16/44.1 drum stems and the file size of the single 10ch 24/48 wavepack file that's 100meg smaller.

What's 2023 using ?

I’ll answer that when I get my audiophile drive, but I suspect it has not changed.

And I think I just realized what you might have meant by ‘moto’. Was it ‘motto’?

I think you may be asking your question to at least one of them
<grin>

Only one of them? I would guess that it's more likely to be all three of them

Because it's simply not true what he's saying, it's blasphemous, see below for an explanation. That's why I still use 32bit Biab wma and JBridge, all the rest is marketing hype. WMA is a standard format that I can use in any audio app, look at the file size below compared to wav and 24bit 48khz wavepack, wma is the best option, it's nice and small and sounds good to me, isn't that why Microsoft made this ? OMG if I could still purchase the DOS version I would have it made.
wma 6.6meg (Winner)
wav 44/16 72meg (loser)
wav 48/24 118meg (loser)
wavepack 48/24 61meg (loser)