Hello vpo-organist,
I confirm Mark's reply (thanks, Mark).
Hauptwerk's audio recorder records the audio stream that plays from the relevant mixer bus, so if the audio output device channels selected from that same bus go to your headphones (and no other buses are also configured to play through your headphones), then the audio that Hauptwerk records will be *exactly* (byte for byte) the same as the audio stream that it sends to the device channels provided that, for the that bus, the bus's settings (apart from whatever specific device channels your headphones use) look like this:
[i.e. both level adjustments of zero, and both '
From the output of this bus']
... and you have '
General settings | General preferences | Audio recording format' set to 32-bit.
A few additional points:
- It's a well-known psycho-acoustic phenomenon that when comparing two audio sources that louder of the two will tend to be perceived as sounding better, so for a fair comparison make sure your audio player is playing the file through your headphones at exactly the same output level that you were hearing the audio through them from Hauptwerk.
- Make sure your audio player is using the same audio driver and channels that Hauptwerk was using, and that the audio player doesn't have any additional processing enabled.
- Make sure that only one audio application (Hauptwerk, or your audio player, etc.) is using the audio device at any given time. Many audio drivers/devices don't allow two applications to have the the same driver/device open simultaneously, and especially so at different sample rates. If the device's sample rate is wrong when playing the file then the pitch will be wrong, which will affect how bright/dull it sounds. Hence also check that your audio interface is actually using the sample rate that you had selected in Hauptwerk (e.g. 48 kHz or 96 kHz), both when using Hauptwerk, and when playing the audio file. (Hauptwerk will have saved the recorded audio files using that sample rate.)
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.