Recording bit depth dropping from 24 to 2
Hello,
Last weekend I recorded drum tracks in Reaper for nineteen songs. I've been looking through the project files this week. Several drum takes in two of the nineteen project files sounded notably worse. I thought one of the preamps was on the fritz, but eventually when I looked at the .wav file info for the recordings on these takes, the bit depth had dropped from the default "Bits/sample: 24 (int)" to "2 aDPCM." I opened all of the project files in the same way, used the same interface, laptop, etc. The takes on which the bit depth dropped by a factor of 12 weren't at the beginning nor the end of the sessions, and there are prior takes in the same project files where the .wav files saved at 24 bits/sample, so I have no clue why the bit depth would have changed and then evidently changed back. Has anyone experienced something similar to this before? Any idea why it happened and how I may prevent it from happening again?
What's also strange is I would expect 2 bits to sound much worse than 24 bits than the corrupted (or whatever) takes do. The cymbals sound sizzlier and more 'digital' / 'pixelated' (sorry for my imprecise diction) but it's more comparable to the difference between a 44.1 kHz sample rate and a 32 kHz. But every project and the interface had the sample rate set to 48 kHz. The bit depth is the only thing that changed.
I disabled wifi access on the recording laptop, but I can transfer and post some screencaps or recordings if that would be helpful to anyone.
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