whillst I really like the sound quality of OGGs over either MP3 and WMA -even at lower bit-rates - I seem to regularly suffer from clipping problems - perhaps I am over-sensitive to the effect of clipping on the sound of music - but it is very annoying.

I rip on my PC - and playback on my Samsung player - which supports WMA, MP3 and OGG.

problem is you use mp3gain to remove clipping on MP3s - but for OGGs since no portable (or very few) support the embedded gain levels produced by something equivalent of mp3gain - there is no solution ? Is this right ?

I've tried normalising (at say 85% max) before encoding - but that doesn't seem to really work.

I don't want to go through every track manually in wav format either.

any ideas please ? I'd love to enjoy my OGGs more than I do at the moment.

thanks, Mark.

You can't remove clipping on MP3s either.

But if you mean that your player clips when the source hits or goes near 0db, the only solution is to destructively apply replaygain on the lossless source (wav) and only then convert to Vorbis.

It is possible to use the scale switch in the encoder command line for adjusting the file volume level. Also, some programs (e.g. foobar) can apply a replay gain adjustment on file conversions.

However, I wonder what you mean by "clipping". Do you hear the same clipping on PC playback or does it happen only with your Samsung? What programs, encoder version and encoding options do you use? Could you provide a sample of a file that does not "clip" before encoding and clearly "clips" after the conversion? (The forum rules allow max 30s samples. The sample should be compressed in a lossless format from the original source. The upload forum is here.)

Try using 75% or lower. Bad decoders clip (winamp's does/did this with 64kbps and dither enabled). Not much you can do except wavegain before you encode.

Maybe this question is stupid, but, have you made sure your source material isn't clipped already?
If it is, there's no way to remove it (unless there's some algorithm out there that guesses the clipped parts, but that would be all), and it doesn't matter much what do you encode to, you won't be getting rid of it.