Audio Clipping Detector

What is audio clipping?

Audio clipping is what happens when a signal exceeds the maximum level a system can represent — 0 dBFS in digital audio. The peaks that should rise above the ceiling get sliced off flat, which adds harmonics that were never in the original sound. You hear it as harsh, crackly clipping sound on loud syllables, drum hits or laughter: the recording works fine at normal levels, then breaks up exactly where the waveform was flattened.

Clipping can enter your audio at several points: the microphone preamp (gain set too high), the interface's analog-to-digital converter, a plugin pushed past 0 dB inside your DAW, or a final export with too much makeup gain. Wherever it happens, the result in the file looks the same — runs of consecutive samples pinned at full scale, called flat tops.

How the detector works

The detector scans your file in 50-millisecond windows. A window is flagged when its peak reaches the digital ceiling (within 0.1 dB of full scale, or above it) and the samples show ceiling behavior — runs of identical at-peak samples, the signature of a flattened waveform. Adjacent flagged windows are merged into clipped segments with start and end timestamps.

Each segment is graded by clipped-sample density: MINOR for isolated single-sample peaks, MODERATE when at least 1% of the samples sit on the ceiling, and SEVERE for sustained flat-topping (10% or more). The whole file then gets one verdict — CLEAN, MINOR or SEVERE — so you can tell at a glance whether to ship it, fix it, or re-record it.

How to fix clipped audio

Prevention beats repair: once a waveform is flattened, the original peaks are gone. If the verdict is MINOR, re-exporting the project at a lower output level (or trimming the offending section) is usually enough. If it is SEVERE, the distortion is recorded into the take — lower your input gain so peaks land around −12 to −6 dBFS and record again. De-clipping plugins can soften the damage, but they reconstruct a guess, not the original audio, so for client deliverables a clean re-record is the safer call.

1. Upload the MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A or OGG file you want checked.

2. Run the scan and read the clip map: where each clipped passage starts and ends, its length, and how hard the signal hit the ceiling.

3. Act on the clean, minor or severe verdict - re-export at a safe level with the Volume Normalizer if it flags trouble.