Author Topic: Clipping Measurement  (Read 16130 times)

sm11963

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Clipping Measurement
« on: January 15, 2014, 20:35:28 »
Hello everyone, I am going through my music collection and it seems that many of my songs (3000 out of 10000) have a clipping value above 100.

I would really like to know more about this value and its what it tells about music files.

How high is it acceptable to keep the file?

Does clipping indicate that this file could damage my speakers?

If I can't notice the difference is it alright to use the music file?

SigHunter

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Re: Clipping Measurement
« Reply #1 on: February 04, 2014, 23:35:31 »
From the Similarity FAQ:

Clipping
This parameter reflects the distortion of the amplitude, when a source input signal gets beyond the limits of the allowable range of an output signal. This parameter is crucial. High values of this field most likely tell about wrong remastering or conversion, or low-quality source music file recording. Once again: pay a close attention to this parameter, because many music files downloaded from Internet have problems with it.
The field is included into the rating calculation. The default worst value (marked with red color) is more or equal to 100.


basically this means the song was pushed too loud so that it might scratch when being played. i don't think this could damage your hardware. if those songs sound fine for you theres no need to worry.

Admin

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Re: Clipping Measurement
« Reply #2 on: March 04, 2014, 15:02:40 »
Ok, firstly you need understand some value in analysis are herustic (what means they can be shown incorrectly), most of values that used in rating calculation is very strict, but not "clipping", current version of algorithm is made to be fast, sometimes it can show high values, with no clipping at all (very rare condition). And secondly some decoders can decode and interpret song with very high level of anti-aliasing and averaging such artifacts, example Apple QuickTime (it's decode all data as 32-bit floating point even if native data 8-bit integer with very high level of smoothing), this is good for playing, not for analyzing, such methods hide some artifacts.

What clipping mean, example take sound data 16bit stereo, sample rate isn't important, and see raw values:
-30000, -30001, -29988, -16000, 89, 8900,
Values near -30000 clipped, because they located near they extreme (min/max) and they repeated (in some small range), normally encoded sound data didn't have such repeating values at all, if we had one value near it extreme, next value would be much different. You need to understand min/max values didn't depend on min/max of integer (-32768,+32767), they absolutely unrelated, some songs could have clipping with min/max equal to 10000, they just made quite.