Audacity Forum

Have A Quick Question!!!

view: show clipping

is this feature working yes?

i have wav files that i bought from online stores and when i play them via audicity,there are showing up as clipped...

i dont know if this is working proper or not

i know when i am recording my old vinyl,i have show clipping on and i try to avoid these straight red lines so i have none of them in my recording

hope that helps!!!

Yes the feature works correctly, but, the waveform only needs to touch the 0 dB line to show up as a red warning line.

Also, there's a phenomena that occurs with MP3 files. MP3 is an inexact method of encoding audio. When it is decoded the peaks may be a little higher or lower than the original. For this reason I would recommend that for your own recordings, always leave a little bit of headroom (set the peak level 1 or 2 dB below 0 dB). This advice goes against the fashion in popular music production for making recordings as loud as possible (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war )

If you zoom in very close on the waveform you will be able to see if there really is clipping, and if there is, how bad it is.
In this example, the first peak is just touching 0 dB and is not actually clipped, whereas the second peak shows signs that it is just clipping. Of course the important thing is how does it sound. If there is a little clipping but you can't hear it, then does it really matter?

Hey Steve!!!

i record my vinyl at -6 or so with audicity and then normalize to -1 to avoid clipping,cause i find if i normalize to 0...clipping appears so -1 is good

i read that normalize is bad for the audio,is this true?

the sound seems pretty fine when normalize to -1 so i was just wondering is this fine to do and do you reckon dont normalize at all?

One thing to be aware of with the Normalize effect in Audacity (and as far as I'm aware it is only Audacity that does this) is that Normalize operates on the left and right channels independently. In some cases this can be a good thing in that it can help to balance the left and right channels if the recording is out of balance. On the other hand it can be a bad thing as a single high spike on one channel can push the normalized recording out of balance.

The better way to "normalize" is to check that left and right channels sound balanced (by listening to it). If it sounds good, then use the "Amplify" effect.
The Amplify effect amplifies both channels by exactly the same amount, so there is no risk of accidentally pushing the recording out of balance. Just set the "New Peak Amplitude" to the desired level (for example -1 dB) and click "OK" and it will safely normalize the recording.

(In the next version of Audacity the Normalize effect will, by default, operate on both channels of a stereo track together, treating it as one sound rather than as two independent channels, though the ability to process tracks separately has been retained as an option for situations when it is appropriate).

Original issue resolved. Topic split to here: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 26&t=61148