(intro)

It’s a set of free presets for Dither, optimized for the Metal genre.

They were made for the mastering of the upcoming metal album, Lust & Insecurity by Animus Invidious.

Noise-shaping dither algorithms are theoretically optimized to “bury” the noise in the frequencies you hear least, while avoiding so much in the preeminent tonalities (in this case, distorted electric guitars focused around 2.5kHz).

Download

You can DOWNLOAD HERE and open the .fxp presets using your DAW of choice. If you happen to use Ableton Live 11, you can additionally access the .adg Racks which allow for more easy snapping-to or fine-tuning of the intensity value.

⚠️ You are also going to need to grab the free TB_Dither_v3 VST2 plugin if you don’t have it already, which has been graciously set free amongst a slew of other awesome legacy TB plugins.

(outro)

TB Dither is one of the coolest dither plugins i’ve encountered because you can set the noise-shaping curve yourself! Neato! I might make curves for various other genres. Maybe not. Will probably depend on how many of them i end up preferring over TPDF on this current project. What’s extra neato is that if a noise shaping curve is too intense, you can dial it back to reduce the obtrusiveness as much as you want.

Over the years i’ve found myself shying away from noise-shaped dithers. They just don’t seem to fit most audio material except for every once in a while. But maybe that’s because the frequency curves are arbitrary, and non-adjustable? I’ve been using TPDF fairly consistently for mastering over the past few years, and every once in a while will A/B a noise-shaped dither vs basic TPDF for the heck of it and almost always end up preferring the TPDF. I know, boring — right?

For my album i’ll be rendering versions with both in order to A/B in blind tests. It remains to be seen whether i will end up using these new bespoke noise-shaped dithered masters for the final Lust & Insecurity tracks, but i’m going to at least give it a shot. Since i can dial back the shaping amount to whatever degree i like, per-track, even down to a little subliminal sprinkle, that greatly increases the chances i’ll actually use it. There is no law saying you can’t use different dither types on different tracks from the same album.

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