Hi,

i just encoded my first CD to MPC and out of the 11 tracks, 8 had warnings about internal clippings on encoding, al la:


WARNING:
There occured 10 internal clippings due to a restriction of StreamVersion 7. Re-encode with '--scale 0.962', or use....

Do most CD's have many tracks that have this problem? I had to re-encode all 8 tracks using the --scale parameter and the errors were gone. But this was quite time consuming!

Im not applying any normalization to the WAV@s or anything because im gonna use replaygain instead.

If anyone is interested, the CD in question is:

Radiohead
Amnesiac (in the special limited case/book)


Does this happen often or is this just a poorly mastered CD (no jokes about the album please )

Thanks a Lot,

Kristian Tippins

This is a limitation of the SV7 format, should be fixed when SV8 comes out.

There are a number of things you can do about this :

- Encode with the --scale 0.xx suggested, but don't go to low or this song will suddenly be of a lower loudness than the rest of the album.

- Use the xlevel switch, I wouldn't recommend this though

- Don't do a thing : listen if you can hear a difference because I can't so I don't bother tinkering with my music, most music nowadays already has lot's of clipping recorded so I doubt you will hear the internal ones.

Take you pick

(No one ever (as I recall) gave a definite answer on what to do)

Listen if you can hear anything wrong or something with the song otherwise I wouldn't bother.

a bit offtopic : is amnesiac or kid a any good????
I've never heard them but I really like the bends and ok computer, but from what I've heard amnesiac and kid a sound totally different.

I admit that i did casually listen to the tracks and couldn't hear anything wrong but i though it may mess up the replay gain calculations perhaps?

If it is scaled really low, shouldn't replaygain bring the level up to the rest of the album anyway?

The lowest scale i got was 0.86, is this low?

I guess i will either adjust it everytime it occurs or ignore it, depends how anal im feeling

Cheers anyway and sorry for my poor typing, stuck a screwdriver through the end of my finger earlier :eek: and so my typings not to good

Cheers,

Kristian

I don't really know that it would interfere with replaygain but I guess not because I know of some people here on the forum that don't re-encode like me and use replaygain.

0.86 is getting quite low indeed.

I at once sat down and listened over and over to tracks that also had quite some internal clipping (popmusic ) because I wanted to know what was the deal with this. But everytime I thought I heard a clipping or something not quite right I found that it also was right there in the original song.

why does everyone recomend that you dont use xlevel?

i dont fully understand what it does, but i dont think frank would throw it in there if it had an adverse affect on the quality.

It's not compatible with the older Buschmann decoders. It's also somewhat of a hack...good for beta purposes, but probably not a great archival solution.

The answer is yes. 'Amnesiac' was effectively ruined in mastering. My ears get fatigued quite easily and with high-quality headphones I feel a headache coming on by the time 'Pyramid Song' fades out. Playing it in the living room while washing dishes in the kitchen is OK, though.

Just look at it, this is 'Knives Out', a "quiet", mellow song:

[img]55835c731b[/img]
(Notice Vertical Zoom is at 100%)

And regarding the clipping, as someone pointed out in another thread, we're talking 10 clipped samples in the context of 44,100 samples per second. I doubt you'll hear it. I suffer far more from the "squashing" and zero-dynamics that the source file exhibits.

Happy Musepacking!

/ Uosdwis

Uosdwis. true, i never even considered the number of clipped samples with the number in the song! Bit silly of me.

Another album i've just done, Limp Bizkit -- Chocolate Starfish ...... had 8 tracks clip, one with over 100 clippings but i still couldn't distinguish any problems so i'll leave it, save the logs for each track that warn me if it clipped and if in the futre i notice problems with the track, i'll check the log for it and re-encode it from the CD using --scale and see if that sorts the problem.

Cheers a lot everyone

Kristian Tippins