maxim|digital audio Dither [Freeware]

Maxim Digital Audio's Dither is a free piece of software that is available for PC computers and any DAW that can support VST plug-ins. I'm pretty sure that these are only available for PC, but I've never tried to install it on a Mac. I honestly don't remember much about installing the plug-in since it was a number of years ago, but as long as you have a fully compatible system you shouldn't encounter any issues. The interface looks the same as many of the other free MDA plug-ins, which is pretty bland but makes it plug-in easy to follow. It's got a simple series of sliders that control a variety of parameters that are not often found on dithering plug-ins. These parameters include word len, which is in bit rate, as well as dither, dither amp, DC trim, and zoom. It definitely takes a bit of time to understand what all of these parameters do, as even if you have used dithering before, you might no be familiar with these parameters. A manual was probably never made for this plug-in, but I don't know this for sure.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

While I was running the Maxim Digital Audio Dither plug-in, it was in Cubase SX and on a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv8000 lap top with a 3.0 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM. I ran it mostly in Cubase SX 2.0, and I ran everything through a MOTU 896 HD audio interface. As far as how much processing power this plug-in will consume, it really isn't much. Plus dither plug-ins will never be the type that you need to run more than one of within a single session. There is really no risk here of not being able to run this plug-in...

OVERALL OPINION

It's always good to have a dithering plug-in available, so why not get the Maxim Digital Audio Dither plug-in for free! It's actual got a whole lot of control over what you can do with this, while most dithering plug-ins kind of just do their thing without much control. It's hard to say how well this compares to something like a POW dither. It doesn't ever hurt to add a free plug-in to your system, so if your system allows you to, you might as well download this and the other MDA free plug-ins that are available.