Clip2

Clip2 is a lot like Clip, except the antialiasing was tweaked a bit and there’s a slider. The slider lets you set a threshold, because I had a user who asked for the ability to bring the clip threshold down that way.

One result is, you can teach yourself about peak versus RMS energy using Clip2. You just bring the slider down, from the 0 db threshold down to -24 db, and listen for what happens. Since there’s no gain trim, it won’t fool you by making ‘louder/distorted’ seem better, and you can find the point where you hear clipping more easily.

This is worth doing: people ignore peak energy at their peril. You may not directly hear the transients that go way above the ‘body’ of the sound, but they’re still sensed, and getting familiar with what peak energy is like can be a huge advantage. Very few sounds really need to be mixed so loud that they can’t have peak energy, and deft use of peak energy makes all the difference in a mix. That’s what keeps a mix from going flat and boring.