Soft clipping and hard limiting

[steve]

@Stimulus

with the default wet and residue settings at 1 and 0 respectively, Audacity’s hard limiter functions a brickwall limiter with a ratio of infinity.

Yes, the audio will be (hard) clipped at the “dB Limit” level.

@Stimulus

Pulling the residue up to 1 should have no effect

With the “Residual” slider set to 1, the audio that is clipped off is stuck back on again, so the net effect is no change to the audio.

@Stimulus

pulling the wet to zero should make the residue useless?

The “Wet level” slider can be thought of as a “output level”. It is not a “Wet/Dry mix”. When set to zero there will be no output. (tested on Linux - I am assuming that it’s the same on other platforms).

@Stimulus

is there a good balance of these settings to imitate a soft clip just in case I later decide to use clip fix

There is really no going back from clipping. ClipFix is an emergency repair tool that tries to recreate clipped audio, but all it can do is “guess” at what the clipped audio should have been. There is no way that any repair tool can accurately recreate the peaks of clipped audio.

If you think that you may want to go back to unclipped audio, export a backup WAV file of the track before you apply the clipping.

If you want “soft clipping” there is a “soft clipping limiter” plug-in here: Peak Limiter / Expander
If you want a peak limiter that does not clip the audio, there is a plug-in here: Limiter