Is audacity good enough to prevent clipping?

[Decaf]

lots of good and bad in this thread

many have tried, and yes it might work on a few songs, but so far there is no proper way to remove clipping without degrading the quality as well... a kid on down4sound thinks he has a method but it doesnt work all the time and it lowers the amplitude of all notes

clipping causes heat and extra power

heat causes the thermal failure of the voicecoil, whereas extra power is what is making the subs overexcurt

most people cannot hear until past 10% distortion, and many are used to the sound of a clipped bass drum, so its hard to train ur ear to hear distortion

and this brings me to my point... stop using the show clipping... just because its red doesnt mean its bad, and simply lowering the amplitude does not solve the problem

once u lower a clipped spot to inside the available data range it is now called distortion

furthermore, even if u lower the amplitude of a clipped waveform, ur amplifier will still try to boost it back up to its original state.... its an amplifier so it does what its told to do from the headunit, which with a few extra clicks on the volume knob u are back to where u started before lowering the amplitude

learn what clipping is, get familiar with it... and use an osciloscope when playing songs for the first time so u can see with ur naked eye the flat horizontal spots that indicate something to look further into

to be honest, a few kids keep jocking me that my music is clipped and bad... they simply aernt educated enough on what they are doing to music and how to read it. for milliseconds mids/highs do go outside of the date range on some songs but it wont do any damamge, and its present in alot of music these days to begin. if u cannot even hear it and u are simply going by the red lines in audacity then u arent fully grasping what to look for

all i would have to do is -.1db amplify the song and all red lines will disappear. i dont always boost a song, and sometimes i make them quieter to align with the volume of the rest of the songs... each song is put in a zip for a reason, and they are songs i play everyday on my own system

[kirill007]

Just a question, since im pretty new to the whole "clipping songs" age aka: ipod, mp3 players... Can a clipped song really damage your system if your system isn't clipping? If that makes any sense... I've had songs that i've downloaded, and sounded different/crappy, but never hurt my system before... Just curious...

There are some older songs, or even certain cd's where the cd is clipped even on older cd's.

It just depends on how the guys at the studio fked up. (Electric guitar's use distortion to sound distorted so some songs with severe solo's can hurt you're mids. )

And a clipped song will damage you're system even if it has been set with a o-scope to not clip with a 0db test tone.

Most of the time, 99.999999999%of the people can't hear clipping in a song, even when if u look at the song in audacity or o-scope it will be quite severe clipping.

So yes a clipped song is dangerous for you're system, because the song is clipped from the source itself (it's even worse) because you amplify the clipping.

EDIT: LordArcane, yes that is possible but it takes a amazing long time to "unclip" a whole song, so that's maybe why nobody has recommended it.(you can even do that in audacity.)

I agree with most of that, but I've been rocking (playing) this music through my systems for the last 5 years and never once had an issue with any of my systems... Was I just lucky, or does it not affect it that much?

Mid's and highs are less prone to fail when sending clipped signal to it. (i can explain if u want)