I have a recorded phone call in which one person’s voice appears to have been clipped short or edited out in some places. This is a wav file. When I open the file in Audacity, I would like to identify the points at which a clipping has occurred. Is there a way to do this by analyzing the waveform or other method? Thank you in advance for any insight. I am inexperienced with audacity.
The only way to tell if an edit was performed is if the edit was done wrong.
A bad edit may not always sound funny, but you can usually tell by inspecting the magnified waves where it is. The top wave in the link is an example of the worst possible edit and it was done on a simple musical tone, but you can also look for straight vertical lines in the waves that clearly don’t match the up and down rhythm in the rest of the performance.
http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/BadAndGoodEdit.jpg
Of course, you’ll be doing this with real audio instead of tones, so it’s a lot harder.
No automatic tools that I know of.
Koz
I think Koz’s answer is correct in the way you meant, but clipping has another meaning of audio that is louder than +/-1 (the maximum level without distortion) - or was at one time. If the audio is above +/-1 then you can use Analyze > Find Clipping, View > Show Clipping, or play the audio and look in Meter Toolbar. Meter Toolbar only shows clipping if there is a run of four or more samples above +/-1.
Gale
Yes, Koz’s answer is what I was looking for, but I was originally confused because I first misunderstood the red vertical lines in the audio that I am looking at to be edit-type ‘clips’ when I see now that they refer to the clips Gale references.
How do I view the wave-type shown in Koz’s screenshot? Also, how do I make a screenshot of the waves so that I can share a jpg? Thanks.
…so that I can share a jpg?
With law enforcement or your attorney?
It’s a forum policy to not get directly involved with legal actions or disputes.
I use three zoom tools. Drag-Select a portion of the blue waves and zoom into it with Control-E. Control-3 zooms out a little bit and Control-F zooms out Full. There are other tools, but I’m wearing those three out from use.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/zooming.html
If you have red vertical lines in your show, it’s because there is damaged sound from overload at those points. It’s usually permanent. The blue waves at those points are damaged, no question, and do not follow normal sound rules.
You can take a screenshot of your Windows machine by pressing the PRT SCRN key. That copies a picture of your screen into Windows memory. Paste it into a Windows program that can handle graphics like Photoshop, Corel Paint, Publisher, Illustrator and if you’re in serious dire straights, Word for Windows. Export that to a JPEG for shipment.
There way be other programs. I’m not an active Windows user.
Macs capture directly to a picture file.
Koz
You need to zoom in really close on the waveform (see: Audacity Manual )
You can create screenshots in PNG format (an image format similar to JPG) using “Help > Screenshot Tools” Audacity Manual
I meant with the forum. But your point is noted.
Thanks for the guidance. This program is addictive.
Once you have your image, please see here for how to attach files: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-attach-files-to-forum-posts/24026/1 .
Holding ALT with PrtScr can be useful if you use that method - it just captures the active window instead of the whole screen.
Gale