So please teach me something here....

[Fish Chris]

I have heard many X's that once an original song is clipped, your pretty much screwed.... or to put it another way, their is not a good way to fix it.

But then I read that it's very easy to completely remove a bass line (or trebles or mids, for that matter) and to replace those lines with your own version... louder, quieter, deeper, or whatever.

So, if a bass line is clipped, and you basically completely remove it, isn't the clipping now eliminated too ?

Not that I would even have the skilz to attempt this myself... but it would at least be nice to know such a thing was possible !

Anyone ?

Fish

[stevog]

decaf is the one that knows this stuff i dont think its possible to remove clipping though.

[Maxim]

This actually makes sense to me. If a song has hardcore clipping bass at like 35 hz and you run a high-pass filter and take out everything under 80hz and make your own clean bassline, that sounds like it should eliminate clipping. It might not be 100% gone but it'd be worlds better than the original version.

[KillaCam]

This actually makes sense to me. If a song has hardcore clipping bass at like 35 hz and you run a high-pass filter and take out everything under 80hz and make your own clean bassline, that sounds like it should eliminate clipping. It might not be 100% gone but it'd be worlds better than the original version.

This, seems like it would work (for lower frequencies).

Id like to hear what decaf has to say.

[n8ball2013]

i thikn its a lot more effort to do that than most are realizing

[IH8PunkRok]

itll sound pretty stupid unless you are really careful and precise but it does nothing for your clipped highs

let me explain:

if you have ever looked really closely at a wave of music you will notice that the higher frequencies essentially "ride" on the lower frequency. so if this fundamental frequency is clipped then all frequencies on it will be clipped as well

so yeah cut out your bassline you will still hear an annoying distortion sound coming from your mids and tweets. just be aware of that

Edited February 27, 2012 by IH8PunkRok

[Decaf]

Ofcourse you can attempt to do that, but placing sine waves ontop of all the mids/highs is no easy task without finding each beat, 4 count, etc. you need something to base timing on. In audacity its very difficult to properly time the notes down to the millsecond.

The above member has it correct that the mids/highs ride the bass lines. Picture the usuable data range of music as an ocean but with a ceiling at 30ft. If there are surfers(mids/highs) riding big waves they are fine as long as they dont go above the ceiling... once they get pushed into the ceiling you can never recover the lost body parts pushed outside the cieling. So yes you can remove the problematic waveform, but the distortion present from clipping will remain.

Lets say you have a 30hz note with 2f and 3f distortion from clipping, or even just that the artist wanted that sound(lex luger for instance) and you highpassfilter it at 80hz... because the filter is sloped some of the 60hz will reside and all of the 90hz with reside with the mids/highs. So then you spend about 30min-60min adding in proper sinewaves only to combine them and it still sounds odd.... that is the remaining distortion you could not remove.

The solution is to use higher crossover points but then that degrades balance if instruments were located within the filter slope.

Lastly, if a song clips its not just the bass affected, any note during the surpassing of 0dB is affected. You can also have distortion/flat bass lines below 0dB, which is why Audacity's "show clipping" is not the best indicator of detrimental clipping.

I'm at work now but i can post pics when I'm home to visual what I'm explaining

[Sergeant_Skyrim]

once they get pushed into the ceiling you can never recover the lost body parts pushed outside the cieling.

[Sergeant_Skyrim]

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/s720x720/396232_3200453882958_1014379508_33088559_832649618_n.jpg

I tried taking a screenshot of Hustle Hard by Ace Hood and I have it zoomed in 12x in Audacity. The track on top is the song, the portion on the bottom is where I added a 45Hz tone. You can see on the top track that instead of being wavy like the tone I generated, it's flat at places where the bass hits.

I'm not sure how to best describe this, but I think this is the harmonic distortion that Decaf was talking about on tracks produced by Lex Luger

[Decaf]

Examples of purposeful distortion would be "North Pole" or "In Love With A White Girl"

An easy way to distinguish is fine the peak in audacity and generate a sine wave of that frequency. Listen to the pure clean sine wave, then listen to the song with the same note and you should be able to hear the difference.

Even order harmonics(2f, 4f, 6f) add a warmth and usually pleasant matching quality whereas odd order harmonics sound misplaced, going against the grain or unsettling sounding.

Tube amps are notorious for adding even order harmonics...often people say the sound of tubes amps is more natural and live sounding. So harmonics arent always a bad thing, but when u have low bass notes and the 2f falls within the subs passband(between subsonic and lpf) you get a rather unpleasant sound compared to a clean note.

Most of rock has distortion, i mean comeon... they use a distortion pedal, lol. Dubstep mids are notoriously harmonic and can really give ur mids a workout. Most of distortion from sub bass can show up in the mids spectrum but can be masked by the sub trying to produce the same notes.