Award Sounds

If you've bought Apple's Logic Studio including Logic Pro 8, then you've also got the Compressor application sitting in your Applications folder.

The application isn't for audio dynamic compression, it's for converting file formats, specifically encoding video files from one format to another. It can also convert files from one audio format to another.

Why bother?

You can convert files in batch by adding them to a queue. Better still, each file can be converted to a different format or to several formats. For each conversion, you can place the resulting file in a different directory.

On top of that, you can use the processing power of multiple networked computers to perform the conversions. I assume they all have to be Apples on OS X and it wouldn't surprise me to hear they all need Compressor's equivalent to Logic's Node.

So from that, it sounds like you can convert movie files and audio files from one format to another with a lot of flexibility

The catch

I can't see a way to apply dithering for audio files. That seems like such a massive drawback. There are times when I need to convert a batch of files from 96k/24bit down to mp3 or to 44.1/16bit wav files. You can do that with Compressor but there's no dithering, so distortion will be introduced into the 16bit files (and mp3s) as the word-lengths are truncated.

The question

Since Compressor is an application designed for converting video files, I can see why audio may be overlooked. But I can't understand why dithering isn't available, for the following points:

1. Video files also have an audio soundtrack. When the audio soundtracks are converted, they'll also suffer from distortion if the word-length is truncated. The situation here is that the soundtracks are combined with the video in their target resolution (e.g. 48kHz/24bit) and all dithering has been done in advance of that. But what happens when they're converted for publication in a smaller, web-friendly format?
2. Isn't dithering required for video files as well? I'll admit that's not my area of expertise. I've seen dithering in image manipulation and because of that, I'd expect to see it in video production as well.

Any ideas?

I'd like to know more about this. Any ideas, then leave a comment below.