well i read about dithering and found out that it should not be used for playing lossless files, but it is good for playing lossy files. ok but:
my music collection is mixed - lossy and lossless...

i don't really feel like getting into the options and unchecking 'dither' every time i play a lossless file and vice versa. would be quite annoying still i want to benefit from dithering so i thought of making this feature request:

it would be great to have a switch which would prevent foobar from using dithering for lossless.
like: "don't dither lossless"
or: "only dither when needed"




by the way i'd like to use this opportunity to say:
i love foobar!
thanks to the developers

I second this request.

Yep, sounds like a great idea.

It depends. Playing back a 24 bit lossless source on a 16 bit soundcard: dithering should be used.

Dithering should probably be used if

1) Output is 16 bits or less
2) Source depth > destination depth

Furthermore, dithering takes cpu time and is seldomly of benefit during normal listening (even though it's theorethically better).

garf, sure are several situations where dithering should be, shouldn't be used...
what i wanted was foobar to decide when to use it and when not to... so i don't have to bother and switch it on and off while listening...

It seem to be great if foobar will convert bit depth only when needed.
So convert only if some DSP's are used. And Input bit depth not equal to output bit depth...

To achieve that. foobar must distinguish bit depth of input plugins. So mp3 input will give 32bit float so usually conversion will be performed (output bit depth is usually narrower). Wav-PCM input will give 16bit integer so usually no conversion will be applied.

Pretty sure this already happens.

you mean foobar already only dithers when it's needed?

so my request would be obsolete



could somebody who actually knows answer this please

No, the post I quoted doesn't mention dither. AFAIK theres no way to do what you want (yet).

So, why will foobar dither if it doesn't convert bit depth? I thing you are wrong about the conversion only when needed...

I agree with Garf and obviously I don't really get the point of this topic. 1) depends on your soundcard and just has to be set one time afaik (does your soundcard support 24 bit or not?). 2) is imho relevant (if at all) for the conversion of files. The converter of foobar2000 0.9 (don't know about 0.8.3) already has an option for semi-automatical handling of when to dither and when not.