The new Thrice CD, The Artist In The Ambulance, has these tiny little clippings in the background you can hear with good headphones. It sounds like the people at the recording studio were drunk.

First time I bought a CD in over 7 months, big mistake.

If anyone wants, I can try to make FLAC sample and host it to a few people, although I am ignorant on how to edit a WAV in Linux, I'm sure I could figure it out .

For anyone who has this CD, awesome despite the clipping, listen to #6 from 2:02 and on closely, you'll hear it. Especially from 2:50 on in that track.

Quite a shame, they're a very talented rock band and this CD is great. B)

Get a clip of it here... http://www.dslreports.com/r0/download/3964...aper_Tigers.zip

Why am I no longer surprised? It sure is nice to be into old vinyl these days, with such a great deal of (actually used) dynamic range and a total lack of clipping.

I just got finished going through the Jane's Addiction CD that just came out, Strays, to fix all the clipping. Man, this thing is even worse than anything I've seen yet. Not only is it compressed to hell with clipping every where, even the QUIET portions of some songs are clipped even though they're well well below the limit. Which would mean that it was clipped before the mastering step, somewhere during mixing. *sigh* I guess Brian "Big Ass" Gardner isn't the only one to blame there after all, and part of the blame lies somewhere else during mixing or even recording perhaps. Man, this situation just gets worse and worse, aggravating.

The worst part is I got this CD just a few days after deleting the windows partition, so I've gotta look into replaygain for Linux again. Why oh why can't we have a Linux foobar.

Linkin Park is still the all time clip king in my book. LOUDER ISN'T BETTER! It sounds like it's overloading the speakers.

For completeness, an explanation of this problem: Over the Limit

Or: How the media labels think that all the waves should be square, and all music white noise...

are you talking about the album "metoera"? i did listen to it and found it unlistenable. zero dynamics and the overcompression sounded like shit. they might as well let it clip next time. my ears felt kinda funny after about 5 minutes into the CD. it sounds very, well, just flat and boring

Yep. Meteora's mastering sucked. I couldn't take listening to it.

this is more of addition rather than an unswer to original post, sorry for hijacking but I really didn't think it was necessory to start a new thread for this

I would like to know if clipping only occurs in high ranges like described above, or is it possible to get clipping in subwoofer. The reason I'm asking is that my Korn Issues CD plays fine on my headphones, but if I put it in my comp which has a 4.1 cretive surrround package to it, the bass (great most of the time) sometimes becomes somehow metallic-like, sounds more like metal giros turning than bass. this effect persists in ogg 10, but goes away in my regular ogg 6.0 (maybe something that's screwed up get's thrown away?) this only occurs in like 1 song though.

overall though Korn has great mastering process, I never heard myself or anyone else complain about clipping, except this one case with bass (others noticed it too). I'm really at a loss, first I thought it was my cheappo-speakers-sub (bought for $100, now retails at $50) but no other song on that CD has it.

are there any know ways to fix? if there is I could rip CD, fix, burn a new one, PLEASE tell me it's possible no I'm not really that frustruated

Seems to happen often these days.

Last new cd I bought was Audioslave. Though I really like the music, listening to this cd is a chore for some reason. It isn't quite so bad on the home stereo, but in the car, where it is usually loud, I just can't seem to crank it up like so many others. And this is in either cd or mp3 format.

To me, it is just a bad job of mastering. Pity....

Totally OT: The new Album is far from what I expected overall in general. They sound like a generic AFI rip-off now and seem to be lacking any of the originality of the last two albums. Not really bad, but still a lot worse than I expected from them, I still want to see them live the next time they come over to Europe.
Hopefully the next Thursday Album is a good as the promos promise...

dev0

<edit>emonerd jukebox: Thrice - [The Artist In The Ambulance] The Artist In The Ambulance [MP3, 212kbps, 3:39] [foobar2000 v0.7 beta 26]</edit>

They seem to have ripped off AFI's clipping as well. Brian Gardner mastered AFI's newest album, "Sing The Sorrow".

Encoded with mppenc 1.14 beta (--quality 5 --xlevel) with replaygain applied (--autodB):

Err? I think it actually sounds surprisingly "good" - at least it's not badly distorted (=doesn't have much audible clipping). Sure it's squashed to hell, and in the really loud guitar riff sections, the voices and drums basically get drowned (very obvious on the chorus of "Easier To Run", you can hardly hear the drums in those sequences), but it's still a lot better than a lot of other albums.

It's still a pity though, because the production on the album is generally fairly good as far as I can tell - I haven't listened to it much. (Oh well... it's not my style of music anyway - I can't stand, what's his name, Chester Bennington shrieking at the top of his voice, and the *real* hard guitar stuff isn't my thing either )

this is just the proof we need to show that musical talent and mastering has gone to hell in a hand basket, take that RIAA!

To edit a wave file in Linux

You should see Audacity, is just great, similar to coolEdit or even SoundForge.

Yeah, this sort of thing actually causes the opposite effect of what they desire, since you can't crank up the volume to live concert levels without getting a splitting headache and massive distortion, blowing your tweeters in the process. When I want my music to sound louder, that's what the volume knob is for! I don't need some moron in the recording studio trying to make the CD sound really loud when it's just clipping.

The only tracks I liked much on the new Thrice album was Cold Cash and Colder Hearts, Stare At The Sun, and Paper Tigers. The single on it pretty much had one good line, "more than just flashing lights and sound", I like the guitar in there. The rest of the song I despised. The rest of the CD is basically background music. Excellent lyrics though. B)

The Illusion of Safety was their best CD, no doubt. See You In The Shallows was amazing.

To think I originally found Thrice on P2P randomly going through ShareReactor music release section stuff for some new rock stuff, heh.

Checking out Audacity now on google, I'll have a clip here soon. 30 seconds is the legal limit, correct?

This is just borrowed webspace and limited, I'm only keeping it there for an hour or so max, it's in -q3 Ogg Vorbis to keep the space down(what really matters is the clipping). Thanks.

A 22 second clip, with headphones you hear the clipping hard from the start.

http://www.dslreports.com/r0/download/3964...aper_Tigers.zip

Compression seems particularly noticeable with the drums. Most of the bands I listen to consist of only a vocalist, a guitarist (or two), a bass guitarist, and a drummer. With bands like this, the "rawness" of the sound is very important. By "rawness" I mean a very powerful, live, in-the-garage sound. For this sound (or something close to it) to come through when listening to an album, the drums in particular must have good dynamic range.

The drums in the clip that you provided are severely lacking in dynamic range. It sounds as if the drums were being played in one room and someone put a microphone next to the wall of the adjacent room. You know you have a problem when the drums appear to be the lowest volume instrument being played.

I noticed the same problem with AFI's "Sing The Sorrow". The drums were so compressed/clipped, they sounded like clicks in the background. It makes the video for "Girl's Not Grey" look ridiculous at times. It shows the drummer banging the drums with an enthusiasm that is not at all reflected in the clicks coming out of the speakers.

Edit:

I think I was confusing clipping with compression. I searched the forum for threads discussing the difference between the two and overcompression seems more likely to be the cause of the "click effect" on the drums. I have changed the first word of this post from "It" to "Compression" to reflect this. Of course, knowing this does not make the drums sound any better. Bad sound is bad sound, regardless of the cause. I have kept the "compressed/clipped" remark in the third paragraph because I have also read that overcompression can cause clipping. The "click effect" could be a combination of both, but I think compression is probably the main problem.

End Edit

Changed the link. I'll let DSLR host it as an attachment.

Lets add a few (older) Cds to this:

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication
A cool album musically (well IMHO) but its horribly scarred. Lots of clipping, very very hard to listen to. I returned the album after I bought it for this.

Monster Magnet: Powertrip
Same here. Anyone who can listen to the title track (Powertrip) at high volume without cringing is a brave (or damaged) man.

Sound forge Noise Reduction 2.0 has an option called 'Clipped Peak Restoration' which actually can do some good if the MASTER volume caused the clipping. The RHCP album was fairly easily fixable with this little program! FYI the program locates 'flat waves' and extrapolates (curve fitting I guess) how the original shouldve looked.

Sadly Monster Magnet's powertrip is beyond most repair RIP.

Cool Edit Pro lets you alter some parameters in its clipping restoration, and this can help on on the worse albums so it may be worth a try on the Monster Magnet one. I just cleaned up the new Jane's Addiction CD and it had a bunch of clipping in the quieter portions of a song or two too. For those quiet sections at first it seemed like the plugin wasn't going to be of any help, because the max volume in those sections is well below full-scale. But I was nicely surprised that when I selected the quiet section itself and ran the plugin again it treated the max volume of the selection as full-scale and proceeded to fix the clipping after all. Also the new Metallica album was in need of a higher 'overhead' percentage setting to fix. The lower portion of the waveform seemed to be lower than the upper portion and the clipping in the upper portion was fixed by the default 1%, but the lower portion was left alone. Raised the overhead value and tried again and that was enough to do the trick.

<edit> added Metallica stuff