FLAC and FX Chain Oversampling

Last Updated on May 8, 2023

DAWs

So many cores, so much ease

I’m currently working through the Homunculus Equinox music on the website, recoding the streamed output to FLAC format, which is lossless, open source, works anywhere and good for streaming.

As perchance would have it, the latest release of my DAW has now got super oversampling on the FX chains.  Setting everything to max has made the reworked sounds a lot more open and airy with noise reduction (mainly rumbles and hisses from the analogue tapes but also shot & thermal noise from the original digitisations) much improved when using FFT cancellations.  It’s great. My new multicore machine I can get all threads running to 50% with no glitches!

Of course, some of it sounds a bit different from the originals – that’s me just now, having a go and a play at things we did a long time ago, which we did under a lot of techical constraints, making a best fit approach to our work.  This is why I’m calling them “reworks 2023”. (sp)

Later. I’ll have to redo my earlier FLAC transposings and reworkings to incorporate the FX oversampling, which makes a difference, on phones, in almost every case. The offline rendering with oversampling set to max now takes a track about half the track length, in time.  Previously, rendering to a piss-poor MP3 format took only a second or two. These earlier offerings on the website were ~2MB or less in size. The FLAC files are ~20MB in comparison.  Any audio artefacts are in the original recording done decades ago on tape.

A decent description of HF sound reflecting back down into the lower sound spectrum giving nasty overtones and mushiness plus the effect of FX oversampling is here.