Audition showing clipping - other software not

Question

Running into a very strange problem. In the waveform view of an mp3 file, I'm seeing a section of peaked audio -- amplitude statistics are below.

My sound engineer client, who created the file in ProTools, says that there's a hard limit at -4 dB and it's not possible for there to be clipping. Is there a setting for the Audition meters that I'm not seeing? Are files getting imported with a volume boost somehow? I've pushed back on this twice already and I want to make sure all my bases are covered before I hit send a third time.

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

To be honest, we can't tell a thing from this. For a start, Audition has to decode any MP3 files you try to open with it, so it's not the actual MP3 you are looking at at all. And secondly, without seeing the actual waveform of what's being displayed, we can't tell how it got to be peaking at over 0dB anyway - encoding a file with a hard limit at -4dB isn't going to produce anything like that level on a decode.

We'd need to see the actual file (or the section of it that is supposedly producing this result) before we could ascertain exactly what's going on here. Audition's meters have absolutely nothing to do with amplitude statistics, incidentally - we are talking about a measurement directly from whatever is displayed in Waveform view. Files do not get decoded with any sort of volume boost at all, but by default, they are decoded and displayed as 32-bit files - but that won't make a scrap of difference either.

Also it's not entirely clear who has produced what here. Where has this file come from originally? You or him?

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