I know it's BAD to alter the original recording (beyond volume normalization anyhow), but with severely clipped albums (Californication, Animositisomina, St. Anger) does it improve matters somewhat if we first normalize, then restore peaks before encoding?

What is the best way to do this? CoolEdit? Any other (cheaper) ways to do it?

CoolEdit's clip-restoration feature is well regarded, and this is an area of software development which has been otherwise largely overlooked. Sometime last week I stumbled across a site run by a fellow who designed his own freeware plugins for CoolEdit 96/2000, with the following functions:



I sent john33 a message about these, with the hope that the code for them might be shared and then included within WaveGain (or developed as a set of standalone binaries).

- M.

Interesting. I would certainly be interested in being able to clean up overcompressed recordings in this way.

I'm of the opinion that it is very wise to do so. I have one big reason for doing so. I like to play my music LOUD. With dangerously clipped recordings I put my tweeters at great risk if I crank those recordings up. Clipping restoration may not give you exactly what was originally there, no, but it isn't any less accurate than the clipped peak is either, really. It sounds a bit better with all the clipping gone, and the risk of blowing speaker drivers is substantially reduced since the main culprit has been removed. The only album I've bothered doing so far is the new Metallica one, St. Anger, but I plan to go through all my loud albums to check for clipping and run them through the process if there's any. I know Dayglo's Feed Us... album is crazy clipped too, come to think of it. Not even compressed like mad, the master's just got the volume up too much and it clipped.

So... for cooledit 2000, does it have built-in clip restoration, or do i have to download that plugin? Where the heck do i find it if it's built-in?

try Effects, Noise Reduction
<edit> Cool Edit Pro seems to have it as standard

When do you know (hear) when its too high volume, and not compression that is the cause of clipping on a cd. They both just result in a louder album, don't they?

no, clipping is when the sound was recorded so loud that it got cut from the CD entirely due to it not fitting within CD parameters.

Yes, I know what clipping is on a cd.

But I don't know when you can hear that the cause is compression and not just cranking up the volume, before it is put on the cd.

well, I'm sure there is probably *some* compression on the album, but the massive amount of clipping doesn't look like it's caused by overcompression in that case. When I'm looking at the songs in Sound Forge they still look like very dynamic recordings, that is, they don't look like a mass of squashed signals. It has tons of peaks and valleys, as any recording from the 80's (before the massive compression craze was even thought of) is likely to have, and the clipping appears to simply be from someone turning up the gain to make the CD a little louder, rather than using compression to get a louder signal while hopefully avoiding clipping. And it is a mid-80's recording originally, which was never on CD in initial release. It was only put out on CD years afterwards. And the band in question is a very very independant low budget act on a very low budget record label. So I wouldn't be surprised if rather than spend some meager time and money on compressing the album a little bit to get it a little louder, someone just simply turned the gain up blindly a few notches to make it a little louder.