vsts bitdepth

supp everyone

i would like to say thanks to the developers of bitter. Its just a unique tool.
i’ve been using bitter to check some vsts i have and the results are freaking me out.
there alot of free and even comercial plugins that do alot of harm to the wordlenght, at least thats what bitter shows.

how can i have more documentation about how bitter measures the bitdepth? cause i am seeing strange artifacts with bitter on some plugins

i really would like to get in contact with the developer.
not sure if this forum should be the right way for it.
nevertheless ill keep trying

once again. amazing piece of software
big up
ez

That’s me, what would you like to know?

Bitter pulls the information value out of each sample by using a bit of a trick, and then shows the mean value of each bit over a short window. So if the last process that touched the audio stream output (for example) 32-bit floating point samples, then 32 bits will be active in Bitter.

hello mr schwa
i wasnt hoping on getting an answer at least not this fast.
thank you

like i said ive been doing tests on some vsts with bitter. i always had this idea that some plugs, even those proposed my thousands of producers, were doing something nasty to my 24bit projects on cubase.
so bitter ended up being crucial for this.

ive tested like 200 vsts (free bundles, comercial ones, cracked ones) and the results are far from good.
like i suspected some plugs really destroy the bitdepth, and bitter shows so many diferent patterns.

  • typical patterns i found on the bitter graph (this is what i wanted to understand):
    - graph always changing after the plug is on. (some delays plugs did this)
    - graph completely disappears (some plugs (like distortion/tube) make the bar graphs in bitter completely disappear. even cubase native distortion. only vintage warmer was the only one that didnt mess bitter completely.
    - graph disappears only on the right side (or left).
    - the normal graph is disperse but some plugs only leave a line at 16bits (this is heavy truncating right?)

i got these pattern graph variations (and others who arent so evident) on alot of plugs even the comercial ones alter the bitdepth but dont reduce it much.

mr schwa you said that if the last process was 32bit it shows 32bit (but if i got a plug in the chain before that truncates to 16bit it will show 32 or 16 in bitter?) this made me think.

i will try to do a list of the proper plugins and the ones who mess up the wordlength. i dont understand why havent anyone done this before.

once again i would like to say thanks for developing such an important software and making it available for free
thank you.

if there are any other way of getting in touch with you i would like to send you the pics of bitter while he´s testing the vsts.
like i said the results are very strange
it was a sad day when i discover my vst arsenal was doing me more harm than good.

ez mate
peace

Feel free to post some images here and I’ll do my best to interpret what they mean.

As for VSTs “doing more harm than good” … I’ll always come down on the side that says if it sounds good, it is good, regardless of what any technical analysis shows.

But having said that, I think tools like Bitter are useful to understand how things work, and also to some extent to debunk some myths. For example, one of the historical selling points of Pro Tools HD systems was the superiority of its 48 bit fixed point signal path, but in reality many big-name plugins convert all audio passing through them to 32-bit floating point regardless of what the host system is. Which doesn’t mean that the plugins sound bad, but it does mean that you don’t get any of the supposed benefits of the expensive HD audio stream handling.