Detect clipping

[cheyrn]

I want to find and fix places where there is clipping.

The manual describes a "mark audio" effect "which process all selected audio, diagnostics scan for problematic or silent areas, and then let you choose which to address.

It says to click "scan" in the diagnostics panel. This fills a list with regions of audio. It says if I want to mark clicking or clipping right-click and select create markers. After this it puts in markers, the first couple of which had no clipped audio near them.

Am I doing something wrong or does it not work?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Next to the 'scan' button there is a 'settings' button. What are the settings set to? This is a little bit critical...

[cheyrn]

Ok. I had not changed the settings. So, I changed it to Define silence as -200 db for 60000 ms (because I don't want to detect silence) and to 0db for more than 10ms (because I want to detect any instance of clipping) and it finds nothing. Actually, I tried .00001 ms but I guess 10 ms is the shortest period.

I know it clips several times over the course of an hour.

If I change db to 1db for more than 10 ms, it replaces 1 with 0 but it finds a section which is the length of the entire clip. If I select create markers it creates no markers. So, at the moment I am out of ideas to try.

I found a place where there is clipping. Using the procedure above it did not mark the place where it clipped.

[ryclark]

The 'Silence' setting is not to detect silence but what is not silence. So you need to set that to a level that you don't want to detect, so, say, -0.1dB in your example and 0dB for the level that you require. But this will still not work because, as you've found, you can't make the sample window short enough to just detect the odd clipped sample.

However you might be better off using the DeClipper from the Diagnostics page to find clipped sample and help you repair them.