Hi, I am looking for a tool to show me the highest signal picks or picks. Please advice me.
Thanks in advance
What are you trying to do?
Do you want to know the “peak level”, or something else?
I need it both as for monitoring and knowing the peak level, and for further processing reference. But I still can’t uerstand why Audacity developers should eliminate such a useful feature ??
The quickest/easiest way to find the peak level is to run the Amplify effect. Audacity has already scanned your file and Amplify will default to whatever gain (or attenuation) is needed for 0dB normalized peaks. For example, if Amplify defaults to +3dB, your current peak is -3dB. (You can then cancel the effect if you don’t want to change the volume.)
Amplify and Normalize also allow to directly-enter a target-peak level. So for example, you can normalize to 0dB or -1dB no matter the current peak.
The optional [u]ACX Check plug-in[/u] will give you the peaks (and more). [u]dpmeter 4[/u] (FREE) also works with Audacity.
What feature has been “eliminated”?
See: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/meter_toolbar.html#playback
As DVDdoug wrote, you can read that from the Amplify effect. (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/amplify.html)
When this effect is opened, it shows the amount below 0 dB in the “Amplification (dB)” window.
For completeness (and most accurate), you can also get the peak level via the Nyquist Prompt effect (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/nyquist_prompt.html)
Linear scale:
(get '*selection* 'peak-level)
dB scale:
(linear-to-db (get '*selection* 'peak-level))
Thanks Steve but looks like you got misunderstood, when I say monitoring I don’t mean playback, otherwise why would I even ask this question ?! I don’t want to spend 8 hours of my time to find out the peak (or peaks) in a 8-hours long track, when it could be easily done with adding a feature which was available before !!
Also amplification does not show me the location of peaks, I need the ACTUAL LOCATION of highest peak or (peaks).
So unfortunately none of these works for this issue.
Regarding your question about the eliminated feature, I read it in this thread from user PhantomTollbooth :
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/finding-highest-peaks-in-a-file/5673/1
Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish and depending on what you’re going to do when you find a peak, it might be more helpful if you turn-on [u]Show Clipping[/u] and then amplify the peaks to something like +0.1dB. Of course, you’ll have to select “Allow Clipping” when you amplify.* That should “bring-out” the highest peak(s) as well as any other peaks that are nearly as high.
I need the ACTUAL LOCATION of highest peak or (peaks).
[u]GoldWave[/u] ($45 USD) can do that. Again, like Audacity’s Amplify effect it’s not a “direct feature” but the Maximize Volume effect will report the maximum peak and it’s location. If you have a stereo file it will show the peaks & location for both channels. But if there are multiple-identical peaks it will only show you the first one so it’s not always helpful. It’s also not that helpful if there’s another peak 0.1dB lower, etc…
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- Amplify won’t actually cause clipping. It’s just showing you potential clipping so it’s not harmful to amplify over 0dB if you lower the levels later (before exporting).
And as you will see in that thread, although I have used Audacity since the early days, I have no recollection of there ever being such a feature. So again I must ask: “What feature has been “eliminated”?”
There is now a plug-in for finding the highest peak: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/find-peak/54287/1
Please provide feedback in that forum topic.
Bumpin’ this ol’ thread since it feels much “on point” with what I’m lookin’ for, or perhaps exactly on point, even though not so many seems to grasp what original thread starter was lookin’ for. Anyways, I use the Amplify effect on a regular basis to put it as high as possible with respect to clippings.
However, sometimes I notice that there are just a few loud peaks (someone coughing or whatever) on say a many hours long session, and then of course I want to manually lower this one (also using Amplify) and then CTRL+A:ing and redo:ing the Amplify-to-maximum-without-clip, just to optimize. So far, I think you follow.
However, sometimes I find it a bit hard to find these “roof tops” (coughs etc) by hand, just lookin’ on the spectrum, so I would like a function to pretty much look automatically for them, like a ALT+F3 (“Search”) which skips to the next dB-at-roof-top-occurance for every time I press Next, or something similar. Have I made myself somewhat clear?
Is this possible with Audacity? Some plugin perhaps? Or some other (free) software that I could combine it with? You might think “Lazy boy, just skill yourself up at searching for them by hand instead of asking for a damn robot to do all your work!” but please, be kind, I am lazy, but also kind! 
Looks like the post immediately before your post would provide a solution.
Another option is this new plug-in that I’ve just uploaded to my blog: https://audionyq.com/label-peaks/
Note that you can tab from one label to the next. (“Shift + Tab” to go to the previous label). See: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/label_tracks.html#navigating
Big thanks for your answer @steve, also sorry for not reading through all the posts in the thread thorough enough to actually find the solution that you so kindly pointed me to, I think I read the first 3~4 posts and reckoned misinterpretation of OP’s intentions so then I ran to the conclusion that no one had some edible solution. But there was one. Thanks. Case closed, on my behalf anyways.