[regal]

I am using Ozone3 with the winamp VST bridge.

With most 16 bit music there is little headroom left for EQ or DSP affect. When you add them you start clipping. I have a 24bit DAC. Is there any way to have ozone convert the 16bit to 24bit which would give more headroom to add the affects?

 

[Rempert]

Once your sound is inside a VST plugin, it is usually at least 32 bit float and in the case of Ozone it should be 64 bit float. So really, it sounds like you just need some gain reduction. I haven't used Ozone, but looking at the website it appears that you have a main interface which includes two gain slider/ peak meters labeled "input" and "output". Pulling down the "input" slider should reduce the gain of your music prior to being processed by the various effects of Ozone. That should give you the necessary headroom.

I don't use WinAmp, but there should be some settings to have it output at 24 bit instead of 16 bit to your soundcard. It would be a good idea to do that also, but it shouldn't make much difference in most cases. That just keeps it from truncating to 16 bits after the processing chain is done.

One thing to keep in mind with VSTs is that they are generally made for music production, so the default presets often sound very bad with music that has already been mastered.

 

[bigshot]

Just normalize down to 85% before applying the filter.

See ya
Steve

 

[regal]

With Winamp there isn't a 24 bit option. There is with foobar but not with the asio out.

But it sounds like the Ozone VST works in 64 bit, so if it is dithering down to 16 bit I should be fine. If it is just truncating then I think normalizing or using the slider woul cut my resolution (6dB=1 bit.)