My team and I have been looking at a new audio recorder for field work (the Mix Pre ii series especially) and I was wondering if FCPX is able to work with 32 bit floating point audio files. Ultimately, our final exports would be in 24 bit but 32 bit would be very helpful for preventing clipped audio and sound mixing.

Unfortunately, I have no way of simply testing this out as I don't have access to a recorder and the sense I get online is that FCPX will accept 32 bit but reformat it to 24, defeating the whole point of recording in 32 bit anyway. I know that Adobe Audition is able to work with 32 bit but unsure about Logic X.

Thank you in advance for your help, curious to hear if anyone has experience working with these files.

Logic has handled floating 32 for a while now, not sure why FCPX wouldn't.

32 bits floating point audio works perfectly in FCP 10.4.6 on my iMac. You can download a sample here
www.sounddevices.com/sample-32-bit-float...bit-fixed-wav-files/
Put this sample in fcpx. Don't move gain on the track but add a gain effect and lower the level to -30 db. You will get exactly the same result as the fix file in Izotope (32_bit_float_30_dB_atten.wav)

32 bit float audio Doesn’t work in Logic.

Are you saying that when exported out of FCPX, the resulting audio remains 32 bit float? I know it handles it in the timeline, but thought it got flattened to 24 bit upon export.

dgwvideo wrote:
You could export in "32-bit" (edit Compressor setting), but it doesn't say "float".

There also remains to be confirmed if FCP really acknowledges the non-integer values (those behind the comma) or if 32-bit (with the float-values ignored) just suffice to restore most recordings.

Obviously (I just learned this) these float values are actually stored in the original file, thereby - for all practical purposes - making the bit depth and DR infinite. For video, floating point just refers to the method of calculating integer values (i.e. 256 in 8-bit), the degree of accuracy with which multiple changes are temporarily being computed (avoiding gross rounding errors) before in the final output everything gets again rounded.

BCH thank you for linking to those soundevices samples, exactly what I needed. 32 bit dynamic range is preserved in the timeline (with gain effect) as you said. It seems like the same is possible in the browser window, even though the thumbnail suggests that the audio is clipped, playback sounds the same as the corrected timeline version. Interestingly enough, if you reduce the individual channels, as opposed to the combined mix, the thumbnail displays the recovered peaks and valleys.

dgwvideo wrote: I'm saying you can correct or fix a wrong rec level gain on a 32bits floating point audio file. This is the interest of this kind of file. I don't see the interest of keeping 32 bits floating for export and I don't know if it's possible.