That's maybe a trivial question, but I searched a bit on the forum and haven't found what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for a way to detect clipping in a soundfile. I'm not refering to the clipping that occurs by encoding a wave with a bad encoder so that the resulting file exceeds the maximum peak level. I want to detect the clipping that occurs due to too loud mastering.
I know that it's nearly impossible to restore the lost data, but I'd like to have an overview over the quality of my music collection and see how much it is a victim of the loudness race.
It would be great if there's a freeware tool that is able to detect clipping and count the number of clips within a file.

I know exactly what you mean, i hear it all the time in my audio cd's. Its quite common and all dependant on the guy sitting behind the mixing desk. I will also be watching this thread for any experts on audio testing adding their input.

I'd also like to test out this as i have some poorly mastered cd's. Im sure cuebase will do it but its very hard to get into.

First, you need to bear in mind that, once a file is digital, there is no way to know for sure that it's clipped, since there can be no samples above 0dB. So all that can be done is to use some kind of heuristic which assumes that more than N consecutive samples above a given level is likely to be caused by clipping.

Subject to the above caveat, Wave Repair will do what you want. It's not freeware, but the bit that doesn't work if it's not registered is the ability to save edits, so if all you want to do is analyse files, then it'll do the job. If you try it out, you'll need to configure the desired number of samples and level of clipping (Operations tab in File|Options).

Thank You!
That's what I was searching for.