[Frank Stearns]

(Scott Dorsey) writes:

In article , Trevor wrote:

Here the masterer casts aspersion on Audition's metering, which I
always took to be a good meter, but anyway, it's an example of
something showing clips in Audition and the creator of the file is
saying there are no actual overs, FWIW.

What a load of crap, there is no "metering" necessary to rip a CD and
display the clipping in any wave editor. And any mastering engineer who
can't tell the CD is really clipped should be out of a job for being
technologically incompetent.

Hint: there is no one definition for an "over" because you can in fact
not measure how far over the signal has gone once it has clipped. All
you can do is decide how many consecutive FS samples you consider an over,
and not everybody sets the limit at the same place.
--scott

Indeed; some tools let you adjust how many FS samples in a row determine a clip.


For the post side of things I've been using the TL Master meter plug-in in Protools
8 -- it's quite a useful tool.

It meters at 8x oversample and thus I assume it can give an idea of just how far
over you've gone. It keeps a running history of where the signal went beyond FS, and
just how far. (I'd be interested to know how it calculates just how far over FS
things have gone, but it appears to do so, to the fractional dB.)

In addition, the visual meters are hugely exaggerated in their scale from -6.02 to
+6.02 -- makes it easy to see how you're tickling (or assaulting) that last bit. (If
the project is going out for real mastering, I rarely get close to FS. But if mix
and master are rolled into one for the starving classical clients, this is a useful
tool to have.)

It's interesting to see the stuff that gets through without lighting any clip
indicators on regular PT and PT plug-in metering, whereas this tool will show
that indeed, things went over.

This assumes, of course, it's properly calibrated and their arithmetic is
correct...

Frank
Mobile Audio
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