[PD] audio bit resolution in Pd

Alexandre Torres Porres porres at gmail.com
Thu Apr 23 00:11:23 CEST 2015


> > It's clear to me that the resolution for audio streams sent from pd (with
> > values between -1 and 1) can't be considered as "32 bits".
>
> which is just wrong: Pd's audio samples are 32bit floating point.
> as such they must be considered as "32bit floating point" which is a)
> "32 bit" and b) something else as "16bit PCM" or "8bit ulaw" or what you
> call "32 bits" (which is likely "32bit fixed point").
>

Maybe I'm not being clear, let me try again. When we talk about "audio in
Pd" we can mean two things:

One is that audio signals in Pd can be just about any number according to
the bit resolution, which is 32-bit float. Cool. I don't remember the
limits of this, but it's just quite a lot.

Another thing is the actual audio that comes out , and the restrains are
numbers from -1 to 1! So, What goes to the soundcard is not all the
possible values that you can get with 32-bit float, and just "less" of
that, which is whatever you can get between -1 and 1 in 32-bit float.

So I start with this idea that the audio (values from -1 to 1) can't be in
full 32 bit float resolution, it's less. I don't see why that is "wrong".
And then, from it, my first question here was: "what is the audio
resolution then?". I'm still clueless here about this answer.

Moreover, is it more or less than what 24 bit audio cards handle?

Cheers
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/attachments/20150422/648adc81/attachment.html>


More information about the Pd-list mailing list