Sorry, had no idea this was so complicated.
You say Wavelab can’t know if a plugin (like the dither plugin) quatizes to 16 bit.
Can Wavelab play a tiny random sample from the montage, and tell what the bitmeter is saying? That would accomplish the same thing to automate what I’m talking about.
That’s all I’m doing manually. Looking at the bitmeter for a very short random period of time, and setting the output file format to have the same bit depth as that, for the whole montage.
Sorry if I’m being a pain about this. On the surface it just seems to me that I’m now manually setting the file format to a fixed value based only on what I’m seeing on the bitmeter at any small random time I pick to play in the montage. And that works for me. Would just like to have it happen automatically.