HydrogenAudio

Around Christmas time I added to the Clipping section and added in SeeDeClip4 to the Mediaserver section of the Wiki.

The clipping article had no outside links and the mediaserver entry matched the others with just a single link to the main website at www.cutestudio.net.

I'm not understanding why this has just been all casually deleted and reverted, and have written to the user who decided it

a) all had to go
and
b) I was to be blocked from posting on the wiki ever again (ban type is infinite).

So far no response.

Given that I've spent a considerable amount of time and expertise in offering a free music server and analyser to the audio community I'm surprised at the uncompromising and brutal censorship and punishment.

Perhaps someone here could explain exactly what I did wrong because it sure puzzles me.

Copy of the email to Greynol:

Hi Greynol.

You appear to have blocked me and deleted all my contributions.
Happy Christmas to you too.

Your stated reason for blocking the clipping page was
   "Spamming links to external sites"

despite there being no link to an external site on that page.
I have been very straightforward and am not trying to hide my interest in clipping and yet I see all of my edit gone. Could you please explain why you simply deleted the whole article instead of just edited the odd part?

Additionall I notice you have also casually deleted by Media player entry, despite that section containing many other media players that are also partly commercial.

I feel therefore that you have reduced the usefulness of the wiki and picked upon my contributions unfairly. What exactly is the reason for removing my media player entry completely??

Is it really that bad to have worked for 12+ years on declipping and to offer a free music server that would be very useful to many DIY audio fans?

I'm not understanding my 'crime' - could you please explain.

Thanks in advance.

Graham of Cutestudio Ltd.

The sinful clipping changes I made can be seen here:
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Clipping&diff=27144&oldid=27143
The deletion of my additions is particularly ironic due to the phrase "You can help Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase by expanding it." being at the bottom of the page.

and the crime of adding an entry for the mediaserver is here
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Topic_Index&diff=next&oldid=27141

although the page I carefully typed in has been completely deleted.
Isn't this supposed to be a list of mediaservers?
Was I not helping the "Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase by expanding it"?
Why was adding SeeDeClip4 to the list a crime?

BTW while I'm typing this I'm listening to the SeeDeClip4 media server in my living room (files + SeeDeClip4 on the garage server, remote on a browser tab on the laptop, music served to the HiFi on an Android Tablet) - so I'm pretty sure it's real.

So I have 2 questions:

1) Why were my additions considered 'Spam'?
2) What is the Wiki actually For??

I can see that Greynol has been busy deleting a lot of stuff
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Greynol

which might help explain why the wiki is still so small and incomplete after all this time.

Any clues gratefully received, I'm obviously missing something about Hydrogenaudio. What is it?

Still no response about my BANNING from the Wiki.
Here's the Wiki's standard policy

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Knowledgebase:Wiki_Policy

I read this before my edits and they all complied. Nowhere does it mention random decisions and instant deletions of content people decide they disagree with. In fact it points to a process with consensus. The deletion and reversion of my edits are not conformant to the wikis own rules or guidelines. How can be co-operate on a wiki when the guidelines are ignored by the general admin?

* Civility
Being rude, insensitive or petty makes people upset and stops Hydrogenaudio from working well. Try to discourage others from being uncivil, and be careful to avoid offending people unintentionally. Mediation is available if needed.
* Editing policy
Improve pages wherever you can, and don't worry about leaving them imperfect. Avoid deleting information wherever possible.

Have a read of the main page here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Main_Page

where you will note the following text:

To get started:
Check out the Topic Index or the Categories List. Click a category to browse the list of sub-categories.

To discuss:
Browse the forums or join #Hydrogenaudio@irc.freenode.net on IRC.

To get help:
Browse the help topics.

To contribute content:
Use the Search box or the Random Page functions on the left navigation bar, and find a place where you have something useful to add!
When editing articles, please observe our wiki policy and standard article guideline. If your article is short, please tag it with {{stub}} at the bottom. You can discuss HAK—whether generally as a platform, or about specific articles or topics—in our dedicated subforum here.

As you can see it invites people to read the guide and contribute.
It also states clearly at the top:

Welcome to the Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase (HAK), a wiki-styled resource designed to be a focal point for information related to all facets of audio technology.

The relevant part is
designed to be a focal point for information related to all facets of audio technology.

So I added an entry for the SeeDeClip4 media server - which - believe it or not - is a FACET OF AUDIO TECHNOLOGY and that gets me an immediate banning from the entire Wiki. WTF?

This is why the Wiki is pathetically inadequate, because people keep deleting useful content. It's not just SeeDeClip4 either - where is GrooveBasin? Groovebasin is a COMPLETELY FREE OPEN SOURCE music server yet it's not in Software or MediaServers either. Did they have it deleted here too?

Frankly the HydrogenAudio Wiki is fast becoming a joke, and a very bad one for me. I have now wasted time learning it and fitting in the new entries to match all the other information there and conforming to the guidelines. I based my SeeDeClip4 entry on RhythmBox which ALSO had a single external link. This was I guess the link I was BANNED for, the link that is stated to be added in the guidelines on the Wik itself.

And now I have to waste my time here asking why I was BANNED from the WIKI for FOLLOWING THE GUIDELINES ON THE WIKI??
Is it just me or is there something wrong with this situation?

Perhaps a new note saying: If you add a single external link to a new Mediaplayer entry you'll be permanently BANNED, despite us asking you to do so in the guidelines and all other entries having one or more links it would help future editors?

BTW I assumed that the Wiki was new when I first added SeeDeClip4 to it as it was so small and incomplete, but having earned my infinite BAN for posting relevant content within the published guidelines and had it instantly deleted, I now have a new theory.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll have an explanation of the Wiki's admin conduct in deleting relevant compliant content without wanrning or discussion, and my BANNING without warning or discussion when all I did was FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES ON THE WIKI.

You should probably wait more than 6 hours before freaking out over being banned from the wiki.

Greynol blocked CuteStudio with an expiry time of indefinite (account creation disabled) (Spamming links to external sites)

According to the log (http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Special:Log/block&page=User%3ACuteStudio), you were banned for spamming.

While only Greynol can tell you exactly why you were banned, I suspect it was because several of your behaviors are consistent with other spammers:

• All of your edits were to add information about one single piece of software
• The software costs money
• Your username is associated with the developer(s) of the software
• Your edit to the Clipping page reads like an advertisement for the software

You should probably wait more than 6 hours before freaking out over being banned from the wiki.

You are probably right, somehow the combination of deletion, defamation and banning has REALLY irritated me.
This is NOT the behaviour or the attitude I expected from a hobby audio site that I've been a long time member of (as long as Greynol BTW).

Quote

Greynol blocked CuteStudio with an expiry time of indefinite (account creation disabled) (Spamming links to external sites)

According to the log (http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Special:Log/block&page=User%3ACuteStudio), you were banned for spamming.

While only Greynol can tell you exactly why you were banned, I suspect it was because several of your behaviors are consistent with other spammers:

• All of your edits were to add information about one single piece of software
• The software costs money
• Your username is associated with the developer(s) of the software
• Your edit to the Clipping page reads like an advertisement for the software

Thanks for your thoughts Octo.

According to the guidelines he could have reverted the edits and let me know, I've only been a member here for 10 years. I don't post a lot but I do read and have a life long interest in audio which surely warrants a courtesy email rather than instant deletion and an indefinite ban that prevents me from even discussing this matter on the Wiki.
I have worked on audio software for a long time and this is my first mediaserver, so I foolishly thought 'I know, I'll add it to the Wiki'. Boy was I wrong :(.

The Wiki policy itself states:

Civility
Being rude, insensitive or petty makes people upset and stops Hydrogenaudio from working well. Try to discourage others from being uncivil, and be careful to avoid offending people unintentionally. Mediation is available if needed.

Editing policy
Improve pages wherever you can, and don't worry about leaving them imperfect. Avoid deleting information wherever possible.

I was afforded neither civility or mediation, and the deletion of information from the wiki is arbitrary and epidemic according to the logs, and not just of my contributions either.

There is also the blocking policy:

Blocking policy
   Disruptive users can be blocked from editing for short or long amounts of time.

I hardly think that adding a mediaserver entry obeying all of the policy and guidelines is disruptive.
Maybe I'll get banned from the main forum now, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

All of your edits were to add information about one single piece of software
Yes, this was the reason I was editing the Wiki. This reason is however not forbidden.
Also who else is going to add these items than the owner? It's a catch 22 - if no one knows it exists no one will add it, and no one will add it if no one knows it exists. I could have set up an anon account from a proxy and added it like that. Would that have helped Hydrogenaudio Wiki readers? I doubt it.

The software costs money
No, the base software is FREE.
Anyone here can freely download and setup a multi-user music server for the home without paying a single penny.

I've the one who has put in the decades of programming experience, audio experience and thousands of hours generating the embedded website software, the multi-threaded debug of the mastering quality analysis and the time to get it running on Windows as well as the easier *nix grade platforms. And that effort is downloadable and useable for FREE.

I note that Windows Media Player is on there - but to use that you have to pay for a Windows license from Microsoft so I can't even try that out without paying. Microsoft has been waging war on the Open Source community for decades and yet suddenly they are purer than I am?
Groovebasin is free and open source and yet that isn't on the Wiki either, and it's not a new piece of software either. Daphile is also missing, which is a shame as it's a very neat server too.

Additionally In Greynol's California there exists the world's largest and richest software companies so I fail to understand the 'hippy commune' excuse that only free software can be mentioned.
That requirement that one can't even charge for software upgrades appears nowhere in  the wiki policy or guidelines.
It would also be great if I didn't need to eat or pay the rent either, but Microsoft - creator of Windows Media Player - has a value of nearly $400bn but I'm wrong to ask for less than a cheap audio cable for software that declips digital music?
How does that work? Am I supposed to feel guilty I need to heat the room where I write this software?

Your username is associated with the developer(s) of the software
Yes, I am CuteStudio. It's not an association, I've been CuteStudio on here for 10 years.
I'm not trying to hide my identity, the username next to the edit is unambigous and clear for any reader to see, what would anyone gain if I hid my identity? Again it's not mentioned or forbidden that the owner of a product can add an entry for it - as I said before - who else will? The wiki is (or should be) freely open to discussion and editing by all HydrogenAudio members, if people disagree with what I say then that's fine, but to censor me and delete all my posts is not what Hydrogenaudio claims to be about.

If I may remind the reader it starts of claiming:
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Main_Page

Welcome to the Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase (HAK), a wiki-styled resource designed to be a focal point for information related to all facets of audio technology. Check out the main topics of HAK:

If it deletes my media server and clipping data it's certainly NOT a focal point is it?
Underneath it invites people to contribute:

To contribute content:
Use the Search box or the Random Page functions on the left navigation bar, and find a place where you have something useful to add!
When editing articles, please observe our wiki policy and standard article guideline. If your article is short, please tag it with {{stub}} at the bottom. You can discuss HAK—whether generally as a platform, or about specific articles or topics—in our dedicated subforum here.

Your edit to the Clipping page reads like an advertisement for the software
Then edit the page.
I mention software that specialises in analysing clips and fixing them. Is that relevant? I think it is, the correct response would be to add some more software that declips audio.

If you actually read the comments I made you'll also notice I clearly state: The best declipper is prevention - choose a track with less clipping to start with.

The clipping entry has problems:
1) It's wrong:  Only a small percentage of clips are at the digital word limit.

2) It's wrong again: Clip audibility is highly dependent on the DAC. The reason I write TxtDeClip a decade ago was because my Behringer DAC had an audible overload from digital clip overshoot.

3) It's too short. Clipping is endemic to our music today. Use Audacity and prove it to yourself. Compression and clipping is the single biggest source of distortion in todays music and I for one have created a FREE program that will catalogue the quality of mastering to a) Publicise this and b) Allow people to choose the better recorded tracks,
This is highly relevant to the topic.

Perhaps rather than sweeping away the edits of someone who's spent the last decade+ studying clipping - to revert it to a faulty and pithy dismissive summery it would have been better to contribute to the topic or discussion instead?
After all the Wiki has a policy of:  Avoid deleting information wherever possible


As for the stated reason for an indefinite ban, we can see the reason given in the title of your post: Spamming links to external sites
Ref: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=User:CuteStudio
I based my entry on the RhythmBox one which has an external link in, that is the only external link I added and conforms with the guidelines for mediaservers
Ref: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Help:Standard_article

==External links==
External links section.

So I don't think that reason can apply unless it's illegal to follow the guidelines on the Wiki itself.
The whole HA experience around the Wiki has been one of dismissive arrogance and hostility, perhaps this is what the site is about and I really don't fit in here.

The basic question Hydrogenaudio mods need to address is:

"What is the Wiki For?"

Because by following it's stated purpose and invitation to contribute has ended up with an incomplete and inaccurate Wiki plus some very ill feelings indeed. The Wiki will remain incomplete and inaccurate while this attitude persists and it's a shame that this has happened, it was entirely preventable if the wiki guidelines were either a) followed or b) people simply edited pages instead of choosing to blindly delete and censor. HiFi has suffered enough of the past few years, 'protecting' the wiki in this way is not helping.

[b]STILL NOTHING AFTER 2 DAYS[/b]

As I'm permanently BANNED from the Wiki I can't post there to discuss the Wiki content, or ask why the SeeDeClip4 multiuser media server was deleted from the Wiki.

I have also not heard why famous, long standing, open source media servers like Groovebasin are not in there either, as well as newer ones like Daphile.

I have however found the address of my original Clipping entry that was deleted - against the wiki rules - so here it is for you all to judge the content for yourselves:

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Clipping&oldid=27143

I used as much of the old content as possible (because the stated Wiki policy is to not delete where possible) to fit my edits around, and to correct the errors. It's quite a good edit I think, I was quite pleased with how it turned out. Make the most of it because now I can't edit it. Or any wiki page. Ever again. That'll teach me and everyone else to contributing our knowledge.

If anyone has Wiki access and agrees with any of the content please feel free to copy it from here and paste it in. Knowledge is however a dangerous thing, people might read it and start experimenting and getting into audio and HiFi, if we want to keep our club and our knowledge secret we have to work hard to stamp out and censor any new information.

If anyone has any deeper permissions I'd advise deleting the entire Wiki, because it's misleading and works like a trap for the unwary (like me). In it's rather chronically pathetic form it's so incomplete that it's not really useful for anything either. Information on there is expanded in far greater detail around the web and obviously it won't be improving any time soon. Which reminds me that I should be contributing to Wikipedia - not this wiki. I only added to this one because I'd been an HA member for ages and it looked rather forlorn. Plus the invite on the main page, which no longer applies.

Perhaps when we all get deleted and banned we can set up another, friendly audio website with adult moderators, opinions and everything. Maybe we'll call it 'diyaudio'.

99% of all modern CDs are clipped?  I saw your edit that you linked to.  It was mostly bullshit and read like an advertisement for a product.  Perhaps you should give it a rest.

Seems pretty clear why you were banned.  If you had handled this better you might have been given a second chance, but at this point, its pretty clear that you should not be editing the wiki at all.

I wish I could feel this deeply about something. Anything, really :-)

E: Your edits are blatant advertising for your own software, that's probably why they were deleted.

99% of all modern CDs are clipped?  I saw your edit that you linked to.  It was mostly bullshit and read like an advertisement for a product.  Perhaps you should give it a rest.

Hi, thanks for your input and for reading the link.
You are actually misquoting me however, the actual quote was:

At a rough estimate 99% of modern pop CDs are clipped

The key word you missed was 'Pop', and of course I prefaced the statement with "It's a rough estimate".
You can edit that in the wiki (or you could if it was still there!) if you disagreed, or wanted to remove the product reference. In fact this is what I expected to happen, quite how a simple Wiki change blew into a review of moderation standards is quite surprising.

As I've seen the clips however, and you haven't, could I ask you to find me a modern pop track that isn't clipped?
You can use Audacity if you don't like my program, or any other clip detection you fancy,

So here's the challenge: Find me a modern pop song that isn't clipped.

There are some around, but they are rare and they are usually not pop, or they are old.
BTW Katie Melua doesn't count as pop, most of her output is rather unusual in not being clipped. She may be the 1% however.

I think you should easily be able to find dozens of unclipped modern pop songs if you are correct however, and the 99% is BS.
Perhaps it's 95%, perhaps it's even as low as 90, you could be right that 99% is a little high, but I think it would be nice for you to pick out some unclipped modern pop because I think from your reply that consider clipping to be a rare phenomena.

Before you start looking - what did you think the percentage was of clipped modern pop? 5%? 10%?

Thanks for your interest and time.

Seems pretty clear why you were banned.  If you had handled this better you might have been given a second chance, but

Thanks for your input saratoga (funny, I've actually driven up past Saratoga from Los Gatos to Alice's Restaurant!).

I'm still not sure why I was banned, sorry - I'm not really getting this am I?

• I added a media server entry (with one external link the same as RhythmBox - the entry I based it on)
• Then I corrected and expanded the related entry (Clipping) mentioning SeeDeClip4 a grand total of 2 times.

Now I'm being a bit slow here, but I'm completely confused about this Wiki now.
It hasn't got Groovebasin but it has Winamp and Windows Mediaplayer etc, so I assumed it wasn't a 'Free Software Only' list.
Nothing in there (did I miss something?) states it's only a list of free software.

So could you please answer the question: Is this ONLY a list for free media players?
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Category:Media_Players
And if the answer is 'Yes', could someone please add a note to that effect?
                (and add Groovebasin - which is totally free - and nothing to do with me).

Obviously I thought this list was something else than other people: So what is it? Help!

at this point, its pretty clear that you should not be editing the wiki at all.

At this point you have experienced the disbelief and frustration of someone who cares about the rapid deterioration of recorded music quality and is trying to do something about it.
Seeing those efforts result in an immediate deletion and banning was a bit like stepping out into the road and being hit by the bus that you made sure wasn't there when you started across.

At the point of the Wiki edit, it was just (I thought!) a harmless addition and an edit that could have been modified to make it less 'advert like' in about 2 minutes by Greynol himself, or a reversion and a note or warning to me so I knew what was going on. I didn't expect warm handshakes and congratulations, but I didn't expect to be nuked either..

This is in fact what the Wiki policy states - please forgive me for finding it ironic that I'm the bad guy for following that policy and someone who didn't is the good guy. What value is the wiki policy?

I wish I could feel this deeply about something. Anything, really :-)

Careful what you wish for, it's a curse ;)

E: Your edits are blatant advertising for your own software, that's probably why they were deleted.

The addition of the media player entry can't I guess be anything else. At least I can't think of a way to write an entry for a player without mentioning what it does and to add the (required by the Wiki guidelines) external link.
So if I got someone else to add it - would that be better? I suspect not, lots gets deleted.

So I see your point but for me that's a catch 22.


As for the Clipping entry edit, I think it's very easy for an article on clipping that mentions a declipper - to not sound like at advert.
I.e. it's easy to have it sound like
a) Hey, look at this big problem you didn't know you even had!!
    - followed by
b) This is a great solution!

So the quick solution would be to just delete the 2 references to SeeDeClip4. I was sort of expecting other people to either do this or to add some different declippers - or maybe I'd get around to it later as I made the mistake of thinking that I had both
a) time
and
b) Edit rights.
The infinite ban really affected those two.

I think my mistake was in assuming the HA wiki was a living hobby/enthusiast Wiki with the usual give and take that for instance goes on at Wikipedia, one adds something, people object or want proof, there's a discussion, and we agree on a solution. In fact did this recently with the visibility of stars from space (and from earth).

If no one is allowed to alter it I still don't understand why it's a) a wiki at all or b) it invites people to alter it.
Sure my edits weren't perfect, but I was trying to get it right and meant well.

A breakthrough!
I think I may have solved one big question though - why the Wiki policy wasn't relevant:
 - it's full of references to Wikipedia - someone's just copy-pasted that one in.
check it out: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Knowledgebase:Wiki_Policy

No wonder I thought it would be a similar process - doh!! I really should have spotted that. I was following the Wikipedia policy. Maybe that's why it all seemed so straightforward and why the fall of the guillotine was a big surprise!

Rest assured however, I won't be contributing to the wiki again, I've learned that it's forbidden, very bad things happen if you do and I'm now protected from myself by a nice big ban. First ban on an audio forum ever too, which is nice. It must be the elemental Hydrogen magic :D

Let me guess, you really like hearing yourself talk, don't you?

This is a response from yesterday and it's refreshing in it's honesty:

99% of all modern CDs are clipped?  I saw your edit that you linked to.  It was mostly bullshit and read like an advertisement for a product.  Perhaps you should give it a rest.

It also tells me that most people have never looked at the waveform and just think clipping is a rare, occasional thing in digital music. Perhaps I should have guessed this as most people I talk to look in disbelief that a record company would effectively vandalize it's product - because it's supposed to be CD quality right?

Sites like Hydrogen audio spend many years discussing whether 16 bits is enough, whether dither can correct that and if 44.1kHz really is HiFi, especially in case of dual channel ultrasonic beat frequencies and filter shapes. There's also the discussion on crossover distortion in class B amps and arguments that NFB wrapped around nonlinear systems like this do more harm than good - all of these facets of audio are discussed.

At the base of everyone's listening system however is The Waveform. Apart from the usual Vinyl vs Digital discussion, remarkably little is said about the compression, limiting and clipping of this waveform. For someone who's been looking at these waveforms for over a decade now it's easy to me to laugh at someone describing the nuances in a track that I know has been rolled into a brick shaped waveform by the record company, and then had a very close shave that chops the top off the peaks at a preset level.

I have also noticed a taboo about criticising The Waveform akin to denying the Moon landings, but having seen thousands of them for myself I feel that the death of public interest in HiFi is more serious than people's need to kid themselves that everything's ok.

Because I've seen the 'CD Quality' sink lower and lower each year I decided to try to do something about this, by writing a media (music) player that clearly shows the user the waveform that they are playing, and analyses all the tracks and ranks them by mastering quality. The hope was that a small groundswell of people would then start demanding better quality from the record companies.
Mentioning this on the HA wiki however didn't go down well and I think the reason is one of mass denial of the issue.

Perhaps then some validation and education would help? As with all education, discovering for yourselves is the best way.
Also here in the USSR software that you can use to improve the waveform and pay to upgrade is nasty, sinful and indeed, evil, we'll be using Audacity for the challenge. You won't need your free cables, free amps and free speakers for this, just your free PC.

The Challenge
Before we start you need to estimate the proportion of modern (2010 on) pop songs that are clipped. I make the claim 99% which has (quite reasonably) been challenged. I like challenges, censorship however is unproductive. 

So before you start - have a guess: Is it 1%, 5%, 10% or even 20% of all modern pop songs.

The challenge is to rip some modern pop (ideally into WAV or FLAC) and use Audacity to look at them.
For each track the HA readership is going to need

• The artist, album, track
• What shape you thought the waveform was (Musical / Compressed / Brick)
• And then by zooming in to the busiest areas tell us (Not clipped / slightly clipped / OMG)

If there's only a small amount of clipping this should only take a few minutes and your nearest modern pop album.
When you've found either:

• A track without any clipping
• or - reached 100 tracks

Please post up the results so we can all see the evidence. It's a great way to prove me wrong so I'm hoping for a few people to have a go. Modern Rock is also fine - Muse etc, it's all good (bad).
I'm still waiting for the first unclipped modern pop track to be found BTW.

Thanks for your interest and time.

Let me guess, you really like hearing yourself talk, don't you?

This is writing Kozmo, I can only hear the keys click.
If you can hear your computer speaking, it may not be your voice or mine..

I look forward to your results of the challenge.

The only person who really should have responded to the initial post, did not.
Rather interesting, don't you think?

99% of all modern CDs are clipped?

Maybe not 99%, but definitely over 50%

The only person who really should have responded to the initial post, did not.
Rather interesting, don't you think?

Quote from: Chibisteven on 2017-01-06 23:34:03

99% of all modern CDs are clipped?

Maybe not 99%, but definitely over 50%

He may well be responding - he may have a large number of CDs to analyse in the quest to find an unclipped track LOL.

I'm picturing in my mind a darkened room, piles of CDs strewn on the floor and a bloodshot, tired researcher slumped at the desk certain that the next track must be the one he was looking for..

It's almost as if someone should write a free program to scan a directory for music tracks and sit there overnight doing a background scan for clips and mastering quality while you sleep. But that would never catch on so I'm sure no one ever will ;)

We should send coffee. :D

What I would rather know is what percentage of modern pop CDs have audible clipping.

What I would rather know is what percentage of modern pop CDs have audible clipping.

It's a good question, I went into a little detail about this on the Wiki entry that was deleted shortly before my indefinite ban. You'd be able to read that of course if it was still there, but the Wiki engine is quite good at keeping some info and I found a copy of the page here:

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Clipping&oldid=27143

There are some before and after clips on my website that is forbidden to mention here for some reason.
The answer however is dependent on these factors in priority order:

• How forgiving your DAC is. Unfortunately this means that every device will present clipping slightly different, a modern CD player will expect the clipping and be as quiet about it as possible.
  
  This is because customers would be forming a queue to return them if they reacted badly to clipping because no modern pop album is clip free and most tracks have many thousands of clips which would form quite an annoying buzz when played.
  
  Like I said on the link though, pro audio DACs are sometimes different because you're not supposed to overdrive the, the behringer DAC I use is cheaper than domestic HiFi DACs and has fantastic quality with clean track. Non remastered Floyd etc all sounds great, but pop on some Red Hot Chilli Peppers and it's like the speaker cones are loose. This was my introduction to digital clipping, as which point I promptly lost the urge to buy CDs and started writing my first declipper
   
• The level of compression and limiting.
  These three factors work together and it depends on the listener. For instance modern generic blando-rock like the Kaiser Chiefs etc. sounds odd when the big loud bits with a guy whacking the snare drum are mysteriously no louder than the bits without any drums, which is a sig of simple compression.
  
  Having owned a drum kit and knowing that the waveform plot of this stuff is shaped like a very precise brick I can't listen to this anymore as it just sounds ridiculous to me now. I'm sure a single acoustic guitar string can have the same waveform magnitude as the hit of a snare - but not in this universe. Next time you're passing a music shop, drop in and give the snare a whack - it's a good reminder of how pathetic modern HiFi and sound recording is. Also it's good fun.  :D
  
  Limiting can fool a declipper but shows up on the clip edge histogram because there's suddenly rather a lot of digital values swarming around the extent of the waveform (which at this stage looks like a brick in Audacity and the forbidden software.
  The 'Floyd's Pulse disk's version of a track from The Final Cut is like this, a big bulge of desperate limiting in the final 4% of of the waveform that's totally absent on the original 1994 version of the CD, which I find must better to listen to.
  
• The audibility of a pure clip - without any DAC overload issues - mainly seems to depend upon the length. During the clip there is no sound, because it's flat/almost flat. So this interrupts the treble and mid for little periods of time like a dotted line, in some tracks that's quite a bit percentage of the whole time (i.e. in some Black Eyed Peas tracks) so you get a discontinuous treble/mid which is less smooth sounding. Then the missing height of the waveform gives you unwanted odd-order harmonic distortion and in itself if of course compression - some of 3-6dB, which reduces impact. This listening depends upon the ears and the person listening however.
  

At any time you are hearing the combination of these effects but they all add up.

The biggest problem is ironically not the clipping itself, but what the forming of these precise brick shaped waveforms does to the music in a more subtle way - it's influencing what we get to listen to now.

Stripped of all dynamics and with snare drums now sounding like the postman putting a rubber band on a pack of envelopes I've noticed the modern emphasis of vocals and lyrics. All the X-factor etc shows are now all singers, because the instruments don't seem to matter any more and there's no dynamic interest there anyway.
There's also support behind the idea that much modern pop is mixed for MP3 which of course isn't HiFi either (i.e. if they aimed for pure WAV we'd be hearing a different mix).

This mastering compression makes any HiFi pointless and redundant. HiFi is good because the quiet bits are sweet and subtle and the loud bits are LOUD, but today everything is 'loud', so everything is average after the volume knob is used.

Whenever I hear some old Stones, Queen, Floyd, Bowie etc. I'm suddenly struck by the sound of the drum kit and the interest in dynamics - especially of course in Floyd's The Wall.

This is why my forbidden product shows the waveform - kids today have never heard decent recordings and have no idea what their music actually 'looks like', and therefore sounds. I'm running out of stuff worth switching my HiFi on for because all the modern stuff is average. When's the last time you actually jumped at the sudden sound on a recording?

So your question is a very good one, but I'd suggest asking

 "What percentage of modern pop CDs have audible dynamics"

Because clipping is merely a symptom of a more serious disease in the record industry. My original product only fixed the clips - this one goes deeper and tells me which are the tracks more likely to be worth listening to - which actually is a more useful thing to know. IMO.

I now had a look at the rejected wiki article, and I side with those who find it deficient.

I don't like the notion that clipping is something that can be fixed. The article makes it clear that it is guesswork, but I think the problem is more fundamental than that. Once the material is clipped, the damage is done, and nothing can undo it. People should not be given the impression that repair is possible. The audible effects of clipping may be made more agreeable in some cases, but the result is a matter of taste. In this sense, any product that advertises itself as a declipper is stifling expectations it can't fulfill.

We have also progressed way beyond the point where mastering just results in clipping. Quite often these days you can't say whether the material is clipped, because the processing has become much more sophisticated. Mastering tools can play tricks with phase, and with frequency-selective dynamic processing, to increase the subjective loudness without causing simple clipping. The chances of undoing this are even more remote.

It is a bit ironic that we have a discussion about this now, as the time when simple clipping started to become a serious problem in CD mastering lies more that 15 years ago. In the arms race for higher loudness, the declippers seem hopelessly outdated.

Short summary: I think that a declipper isn't a suitable weapon in the war that has been going on for two decades now. I wouldn't like to have a wiki article that conveys the false notion that it is.

So here's the challenge: Find me a modern pop song that isn't clipped.

So here's the challenge: Understand what "burden of proof" means.

Edit:
I think there were traces of a reasonable discussion in this thread https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,33226.msg880152.html#msg880152
on what software authors should (not) highlight about their own products.

I now had a look at the rejected wiki article, and I side with those who find it deficient.

I agree, I would remove or considerably shorten the section entitled 'Does clipping affect me?", I think I may have copied that bit in accidentally. Without that section I consider it fairly balanced. I have no problem at all with people wanting to change, alter, discuss anything. Why should I? What I object to is immediate and infinite bans without thought, consideration, knowledge or conforming to the Wiki policy itself. Now it just looks stupid with mistakes in it.

Additionally the deletion of the  SeeDeClip4 entry in the media server list was uncalled for. It is, after all, a media server, even if a mod does dislike me. I also note that no one has added Groovebasin since I mentioned it - it seems to be a very small, random list.

I don't like the notion that clipping is something that can be fixed. The article makes it clear that it is guesswork, but I think the problem is more fundamental than that. Once the material is clipped, the damage is done, and nothing can undo it. People should not be given the impression that repair is possible. The audible effects of clipping may be made more agreeable in some cases, but the result is a matter of taste. In this sense, any product that advertises itself as a declipper is stifling expectations it can't fulfill.

We have also progressed way beyond the point where mastering just results in clipping. Quite often these days you can't say whether the material is clipped, because the processing has become much more sophisticated. Mastering tools can play tricks with phase, and with frequency-selective dynamic processing, to increase the subjective loudness without causing simple clipping. The chances of undoing this are even more remote.

Again I agree, and to prove that I agree could you please read the last part of the post directly above yours?
It starts "Reply #17 – Today at 05:16:37 PM"

The main point in Reply #17 was that I wrote a declipper around 12 years ago, but this year I finished a free software tool that tells you how well mastered the tracks are. This is how I know that all or most modern pop is clipped BTW, I have it on my screen in a big list.

Additionally even in modern pop there is still simple clipping, compression with simple clipping and all the combinations in between - some modern tracks are easy to declip and look and sound pretty good afterwards. But yes, the information is lost, and the new information added to fill the vacuum (clip) is by definition, not the original. Personally I much prefer listening to the declipped version though.

It is a bit ironic that we have a discussion about this now, as the time when simple clipping started to become a serious problem in CD mastering lies more that 15 years ago. In the arms race for higher loudness, the declippers seem hopelessly outdated.

The discussion was had 15 years ago, and every year since.
Last year I had a thought that if people could SEE the waveform they were playing they might realise something, somewhere might be wrong, because nothing else has worked.

It's also rather sad that my initial attempts to spread this new idea - aimed at creating a groundswell of protest and demands for better sound - and planted right in the middle of the group who are most affected by it - was immediately greeted with deletions, banning and hostility.
If a hobby audio site is happy with 15bit CD quality - where the missing bit is the most significant one - who am I to suggest how to move forward in HiFi? No one else cares, I listen to the best sound I can - based on better waveforms than anyone here has access to, so why do I bother?

The decline of the HiFi industry has followed a close path with the degradation of dynamics in music. By removing any benefit HiFi had over the car radio the nation has - quite naturally - stopped buying HiFi. Because with modern pop - why would you? I have the huge benefit over todays buyers because I actually like the old stuff - which I can obtain in pretty good shape if I dodge the 'remasters', the next generation will never know good HiFi or sound.

Short summary: I think that a declipper isn't a suitable weapon in the war that has been going on for two decades now. I wouldn't like to have a wiki article that conveys the false notion that it is.

Agreed, which is why it's not just a declipper (and the free version doesn't declip BTW). It's a music server that shows you the mastering quality of each track so you can select the good ones.

Also - about that wiki article - I couldn't find a 'Loudness War' entry in the Wiki (another huge omission?) and the 'Clipping' entry was inaccurate anyway so I fixed and added to that.

I didn't want to spend too much time and effort editing the Wiki to add the history of the loudness war because I wanted to see any responses and comments to the additions I had made. As I was immediately banned and all traces of my edits deleted this turned out to be a Very Wise Move...

Now I've answered all of your points, could you perhaps explain what you contributed to fighting the Loudness War as you've obviously been aware of it for some time?

Quote from: CuteStudio on 2017-01-07 20:56:51

So here's the challenge: Find me a modern pop song that isn't clipped.

So here's the challenge: Understand what "burden of proof" means.

So you haven't managed to find an unclipped modern pop track either eh?

My challenge was for Chibisteven to prove his assertion that '99% of all modern CDs are clipped ...  bullshit '

99% of all modern CDs are clipped?  I saw your edit that you linked to.  It was mostly bullshit and read like an advertisement for a product.  Perhaps you should give it a rest.

He only had to find one track. What didn't you understand about that? Should be easy right?

But perhaps you think I need to go further than just asking people to back up their insults?

Perhaps I need to add a 'Hall of Shame' page to my website with a list of all the CDs I ripped and the full clipping analysis? Well I did that several years ago.

Perhaps I should go further and write some free software that runs on any Windows, Mac or Linux box and analyses each persons music collection for them, and tells them exactly how many clips, how much lost time and the ppm of track lost in clips?
Well I've already done that too.

What more proof did you require? A hand delivered report to your desk?

Edit:
I think there were traces of a reasonable discussion in this thread https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,33226.msg880152.html#msg880152
on what software authors should (not) highlight about their own products.

Thanks for finding that.
It needs adding to the Wiki's sparse Media Server page where it would actually be useful, congratulations for volunteering.

Quote from: Porcus on 2017-01-09 15:29:38

Quote from: CuteStudio on 2017-01-07 20:56:51

So here's the challenge: Find me a modern pop song that isn't clipped.

So here's the challenge: Understand what "burden of proof" means.

So you haven't managed to find an unclipped modern pop track either eh?

Why should I spend my time trying to verify or falsify your marketing claims? You should be expected to have evidence at your fingertips before trying to sell a product with such an ad.

Tell me, why is it reasonable to require me to spend my day listening to music I do not like, only to have you discard any example as "that's not modern pop"? given that it is you who (I) make marketing claims without citing sources, and (II) and enter it in a wiki which is not supposed to be an outlet for marketing claims in the first place?

These days are confusing!
First BS found we need MQA to know how it was meant to sound and now i learn everything is clipped and must be repaired in a way only CS knows.
BZZOWNT

Again I agree, and to prove that I agree could you please read the last part of the post directly above yours?
It starts "Reply #17 – Today at 05:16:37 PM"

The main point in Reply #17 was that I wrote a declipper around 12 years ago, but this year I finished a free software tool that tells you how well mastered the tracks are. This is how I know that all or most modern pop is clipped BTW, I have it on my screen in a big list.

Sorry for not taking this into account. I was mainly looking at the rejected wiki article.

Additionally even in modern pop there is still simple clipping, compression with simple clipping and all the combinations in between - some modern tracks are easy to declip and look and sound pretty good afterwards. But yes, the information is lost, and the new information added to fill the vacuum (clip) is by definition, not the original. Personally I much prefer listening to the declipped version though.

That may very well be so. My own experience and stance is somewhat different, which may have its roots in a different music selection, and/or in different playback gear. For quite some time now I don't consider clipping to be the main problem anymore. Early playback equipment frequently reacted to clipped source material with extra distortion (intersample overs triggering problems in digital filters). This has changed for the better, and can easily be avoided by reducing the level slightly on the digital side.

The main problem is the loudness war itself, which leads to overcompression in mastering, which affects the way the material sounds, even when there is no clipping problem. There are dynamic range databases for quite some time now, to allow people to make an educated guess before buying. They have their own serious problems, as we all should know by now.

Last year I had a thought that if people could SEE the waveform they were playing they might realise something, somewhere might be wrong, because nothing else has worked.

It's also rather sad that my initial attempts to spread this new idea - aimed at creating a groundswell of protest and demands for better sound - and planted right in the middle of the group who are most affected by it - was immediately greeted with deletions, banning and hostility.

I don't know why the reaction was as hostile as it was, but given that we have had discussions about this numerous times here, people may just have acquired short temper.

If a hobby audio site is happy with 15bit CD quality - where the missing bit is the most significant one - who am I to suggest how to move forward in HiFi? No one else cares, I listen to the best sound I can - based on better waveforms than anyone here has access to, so why do I bother?

I am much beyond trying to measure sound quality in bits.

The decline of the HiFi industry has followed a close path with the degradation of dynamics in music. By removing any benefit HiFi had over the car radio the nation has - quite naturally - stopped buying HiFi. Because with modern pop - why would you? I have the huge benefit over todays buyers because I actually like the old stuff - which I can obtain in pretty good shape if I dodge the 'remasters', the next generation will never know good HiFi or sound.

There are a few more factors contributing to this.

Firstly, the CD has long ceased to be regarded as a quality medium, and the fact that all attempts at establishing an effective copy protection scheme had led content producers to try to establish alternative media that allow them to control copying. I would venture to assert that at least some of them have tried quite deliberately to harm the CD's quality peception to help moving people over to a different medium. They gave the people overcompressed shit because that's what they wanted to do. It wasn't an accident. Much to their frustration, the other media (i.e. SACD, DVD, ...) didn't catch on. They now pin their hopes on streaming.

Secondly, they haven't got enough money to do several different masterings of the same thing for different applications, and end up going for the broadest market. Kind of a lowest common denominator approach.

Now I've answered all of your points, could you perhaps explain what you contributed to fighting the Loudness War as you've obviously been aware of it for some time?

I became aware of it around 2000, if I remember correctly. Besides numerous forum posts and a few blog posts, I can't say that I worked actively against the loudness war. My own pet theory is that it could be killed dead by introducing a floating point distribution format that doesn't have a clipping point of any practical relevance. Removing the wall everone is banging their head against should remove the damage to the heads. But alas, I seem to have difficulties convincing people of this way. I failed miserably (https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,108228.0.html) here in this forum.

Edit: Quotes repaired.

This discussion is trying to accomplish too many things at once.

• Substantive debate about declipping
• Back-and-forth about the loudness wars and statistics of distributed music
• Debate about the proper ways to deal with overly broad statements on the wiki and other disputes there
• Questions about policies for allowing software authors and other experts to contribute to the wiki
• Questions about Greynol's behavior patterns as a moderator and a wiki editor
• Questions about cutestudio's edits and whether he should have wiki edit privileges

At least some of these discussions need to be separated somehow and addressed more generally and dispassionately.

CuteStudio, if you think greynol has overreacted and acted irrationally or based on emotion/hot temper, the most important thing for you to do is to avoid overreacting, act rationally, and keep temper and emotion in check. Try to be more concise and dispassionate in your complaints.

Here's my take on the first few of those topics; I may comment on the others later.

1. In a couple of other threads as well, Greynol and others have been unjustly dismissive of declipping. For highly variable signals such as speech, where clipped regions are likely to be short, isolated, and very severe, good audio restoration algorithms frequently improve the SNR by more than 12dB. It is not at all difficult to hear the improvement either (esp. the reduction in boomy full-spectrum distortion during clipped vowels). For less variable signals (most music), if the severity of clipping is high enough to make an obvious audible difference, it's likely that so many samples are clipped that a restoration algorithm has insufficient information for a really good reconstruction. Improvements are likely to be much smaller, say 6dB or less, but may still be worth pursuing.

This is not some kind of weird audiophile junk. This is a well-posed set of mathematical problems which have seen good theoretical and engineering work. Sadly the only open-source stuff I'm aware of are Audacity's clipfix, which is a very naive (cubic interpolation is not very appropriate for audio) simple hack Ben Schwartz (later of Xiph fame) did back as an undergraduate, and Monty's postfish, which does a reasonable job but is not as simple to work with (linux only, no distro includes binaries, source only available via svn, odd build dependencies, doesn't integrate into other kinds of toolchains). Audacity's "repair" effect, which does least squares autoregression, could probably be turned into a halfway decent declipper if combined with something that detected the clipped regions. Implementing the algorithms from any of the various recently published academic papers on the subject might be more competitive with the closed-source solutions.

2. If someone puts an overbroad statement about clipping in pop songs on the wiki, the right way to deal with that is a [citation needed] and then remove the offending statement if evidence is not provided in a timely way. We don't need to sit here and argue about the loudness wars and how they should have been addressed twenty years ago.

3. I don't think mass deletion and reversion and blocking users at the first suspicion is sensible for dealing with a small closed-membership wiki.

If I just take out one deleted part:

=== Does clipping affect me? ===
At a rough estimate 99% of modern pop CDs are clipped. Without analysing each one it can be tricky to tell how bad the problem is.

That ↑ alone reads as scare-ware which is a common scam tactics (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQrAHGpBz3PqBV4-_9PdDcA). Personally I'd KICK/ban you if that was possible. Thats kick 1st, ban 2nd. But that is just my subjective opinion not based on any listening tests.
edit: I have to give you some points for amount of text you are able to produce, roughly 43K in this thread only (measured with: du -h --apparent-size -). p.s. Luckily only 16K when xz compressed.

Why should I spend my time trying to verify or falsify your marketing claims?

Wrong premise, marketing claims are the capability of a product.
My challenge was about the problem of clipped tracks, not a possible solution.
Pointing out that your drain is blocked is not a marketing claim either.

The evidence and proof is there in front of you, should you decide to look at it instead of arguing here, you are refuting a body of evidence with the excuse that you can't be bothered to look at the evidence. It's amusing but rather a waste of your time.

Here is a list of badly clipped CDs, it will take you less time to scan that than to complain again on here:
http://www.cutestudio.net/data/digital_clipping/shame/index.php

In case clicking that link is too much effort, here's a typical entry:
Madonna
meter11.png "True Blue Remastered", 52m:34s, max track level -9.99dB rms
11 tracks, 354263 clips, dynamics 10.17dB to 12.38dB
28.3s
112.3Hz

If you actually want to learn about digital clipping you can read this:
http://www.cutestudio.net/data/digital_clipping/index.php
If you find mistakes or disagree please let me know, I can actually edit this.

If you want to test your own music collection with some free software that runs on any Windows, Mac or Linux box and analyses the whole music collection for you, go here
http://www.cutestudio.net/
and download it here
http://www.cutestudio.net/data/download/index.php

You have asked for proof. I have given it. I can't influence your decision to ignore it.
Please let me know if you'd like any other free proofs of the endemic clipping on modern CDs.

These days are confusing!
First BS found we need MQA to know how it was meant to sound and now i learn everything is clipped and must be repaired in a way only CS knows.
BZZOWNT

Sorry I didn't understand this, could you please define:
BS
MQA
CS

please.

Quote from: Porcus on 2017-01-09 17:46:36

Why should I spend my time trying to verify or falsify your marketing claims?

Wrong premise, marketing claims are the capability of a product.

Worship me, and you will not go to Hell.

The main problem is the loudness war itself, which leads to overcompression in mastering, which affects the way the material sounds, even when there is no clipping problem. There are dynamic range databases for quite some time now, to allow people to make an educated guess before buying. They have their own serious problems, as we all should know by now.

Agreed 100%.

My own rating of each track takes account of not just clipping and clip duration but also dynamic range (peak-RMS), I may fine tune it later to include super-compression as the histogram gives that data - you can see the statistical bulge created by that.
The aim of SeeDeClip4 is to show me which tracks to play, SeeDeClip3 was fine at just declipping but that's not enough today. Obviously I used that module in 4 as I have it and it does remarkable stuff with sum tracks, but 'cleverly' limited renders it redundant.

Modern mastering seems to be like a steel mill, they usually (but not always!) use hot rollers to iron out the dynamics, and then there's a stage to remove the imperfections that got away by milling them off the surface.

Sadly this process also creates music as dynamic as a flat steel bar, which even the most expensive cables and interconnects don't cure.

For the tracks that are just clipped the repair is probably quite good, but some tracks are 'cleverly' compressed so they are damaged for all time. Looking at some tracks one can see the mastering engineer put in quite a bit of effort to damage the track.

I don't know why the reaction was as hostile as it was, but given that we have had discussions about this numerous times here, people may just have acquired short temper.

I suspect it's a taboo subject. HA's 'holy cow'.

People spend thousands on their gear and even hundreds on some stupid cables, when you tell them that they've a) been feeding in damaged waveforms - and worse: b) you can prove it on their own PC with their own music, it's a huge blow.
It's a bit like discovering termites have hollowed out your foundations and spraying won't help now.

I think I'm getting blowback from the Denial and Anger phases, the Acceptance phase will be a long wait - we've already had 2 decades as you said - and no one has accepted it yet.

Firstly, the CD has long ceased to be regarded as a quality medium, and the fact that all attempts at establishing an effective copy protection scheme had led content producers to try to establish alternative media that allow them to control copying. I would venture to assert that at least some of them have tried quite deliberately to harm the CD's quality peception to help moving people over to a different medium. They gave the people overcompressed shit because that's what they wanted to do. It wasn't an accident. Much to their frustration, the other media (i.e. SACD, DVD, ...) didn't catch on. They now pin their hopes on streaming.

Secondly, they haven't got enough money to do several different masterings of the same thing for different applications, and end up going for the broadest market. Kind of a lowest common denominator approach.

I suspect sadly that you are right. 2008 was the era I noticed most mention of the loudness war, since them most have given up or stopped caring in the face of an intransigent music industry.

I'm mentioned before that the loudness war has started a 'tail wagging the dog' effect of new music being vocal focussed, reading your comments makes me think that it also plays into the hands of the corporate music industry - not from just the point of having their X-factor singing competitions, but also from locking those inconvenient bands out, bands that tend to have their own ideas in songs that don't follow the mainstream narrative.
It was Clinton who deregulated radio in the US - the result now is that almost all US radio is now under a handful of big corporations who lock in a short politically correct, banal playlist on repeat.

My own pet theory is that it could be killed dead by introducing a floating point distribution format that doesn't have a clipping point of any practical relevance. Removing the wall everyone is banging their head against should remove the damage to the heads. But alas, I seem to have difficulties convincing people of this way. I failed miserably (https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,108228.0.html) here in this forum.

I had a read of that thread - thanks for posting it. At reply #9 you were basically fighting off a hostile audience picking irrelevant holes in the idea. Floating point would be a very good idea IMO, with the standard mandating a min/max extent number in the header - to remove the +/- 1.0 convention in current WAVs.

Since the CD many viable file formats have been created, including ODF (http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-why-the-odf-vs-ooxml-battle-matters/) which is rather more complex than an array of IEEE floats and a trivial header.

Perhaps Denial is at play here - people I guess don't want to know the truth about the music they are playing.

This discussion is trying to accomplish too many things at once.

• Substantive debate about declipping
• Back-and-forth about the loudness wars and statistics of distributed music
• Debate about the proper ways to deal with overly broad statements on the wiki and other disputes there
• Questions about policies for allowing software authors and other experts to contribute to the wiki
• Questions about Greynol's behavior patterns as a moderator and a wiki editor
• Questions about cutestudio's edits and whether he should have wiki edit privileges

At least some of these discussions need to be separated somehow and addressed more generally and dispassionately.

CuteStudio, if you think greynol has overreacted and acted irrationally or based on emotion/hot temper, the most important thing for you to do is to avoid overreacting, act rationally, and keep temper and emotion in check. Try to be more concise and dispassionate in your complaints.

Here's my take on the first few of those topics; I may comment on the others later.

1. In a couple of other threads as well, Greynol and others have been unjustly dismissive of declipping. For highly variable signals such as speech, where clipped regions are likely to be short, isolated, and very severe, good audio restoration algorithms frequently improve the SNR by more than 12dB. It is not at all difficult to hear the improvement either (esp. the reduction in boomy full-spectrum distortion during clipped vowels). For less variable signals (most music), if the severity of clipping is high enough to make an obvious audible difference, it's likely that so many samples are clipped that a restoration algorithm has insufficient information for a really good reconstruction. Improvements are likely to be much smaller, say 6dB or less, but may still be worth pursuing.

This is not some kind of weird audiophile junk. This is a well-posed set of mathematical problems which have seen good theoretical and engineering work. Sadly the only open-source stuff I'm aware of are Audacity's clipfix, which is a very naive (cubic interpolation is not very appropriate for audio) simple hack Ben Schwartz (later of Xiph fame) did back as an undergraduate, and Monty's postfish, which does a reasonable job but is not as simple to work with (linux only, no distro includes binaries, source only available via svn, odd build dependencies, doesn't integrate into other kinds of toolchains). Audacity's "repair" effect, which does least squares autoregression, could probably be turned into a halfway decent declipper if combined with something that detected the clipped regions. Implementing the algorithms from any of the various recently published academic papers on the subject might be more competitive with the closed-source solutions.

2. If someone puts an overbroad statement about clipping in pop songs on the wiki, the right way to deal with that is a [citation needed] and then remove the offending statement if evidence is not provided in a timely way. We don't need to sit here and argue about the loudness wars and how they should have been addressed twenty years ago.

3. I don't think mass deletion and reversion and blocking users at the first suspicion is sensible for dealing with a small closed-membership wiki.

Thanks for your thoughts jensend, all relevant and all noted.
Greynol hasn't come back to me yet to explain any of his actions, I can only assume he's on holiday.

Censorship is always difficult to defend and to counter, it seems to be more and more the 'answer' to awkward subjects that no one likes discussing.
Moderation is usually a way to keep a forum/wiki running smoothly, one has to question it's effectiveness when it does the exact opposite, stifling discussion and suppressing alternate viewpoints - even when they are backed up with evidence and proof.

I'm also learning that the quality of the digital source is a sacred cow here. For me as a programmer it's simply input data so I have no bias - I'm used to all types of data quality, perhaps the audio hobbyist is particularly attached to a romantic 'perfection' of the signal. Clues for this are in the number of posts about 'bit perfect' quality. Boy if they looked at their 'bit perfect' waveform in Audacity they'd have a nasty surprise!!

This isn't helped by people never seeing the waveform - but I have to admit it's disappointing that people on a hobby audio website are too afraid to even look for themselves.

This is a typical modern track with around 50,000 clips.
The histogram shows quite severe compression (rather than limiting which is a bulge like a dolphin surfacing). That histogram would be very sparse - mostly black - on a well recorded track, that bright white is all artificial compression.
Note there is still clipping, so it was also given a good shave after the compression.

(https://s24.postimg.org/4tnndtlgx/Screen_Shot_2017_01_10_at_11_00_31.png) (https://postimg.org/image/4tnndtlgx/)
Click on the thumbnail/blob to view.

Perhaps it's all too familiar for me as I see it every single day. Literally - in the detail above.
Note that this song is not 'special' for modern pop, it's average - I've seen (and mistakenly paid for) much worse.

One can lead a horse to water but making it drink is another ball game.

My challenge was for Chibisteven to prove his assertion that '99% of all modern CDs are clipped ...  bullshit '

Because it's easy to make a loud CD without introducing any clipping.  I've done it with a few recorded MIDIs using the free version of Stereo Tool and that's an application designed for being as loud as other radio stations and even louder if one wants to.  I can imagine the methods and stuff used by more experienced professionals who do this for a living can do a 100 times better job at it than me and have access to tons of expensive tools at their disposal.

I've bought CDs in the last few years of recent albums and found no signs of clipping but they were loud nonetheless.

Agreed 100%.

You agree, yet seem to miss my point entirely. I was trying to tell you that your tool and your general approach doesn't solve the problem. You can't agree with me and in the next sentence carry on advocating your tool. There's a large cognitive dissonance here.

I suspect it's a taboo subject. HA's 'holy cow'.

That's almost certainly the wrong suspicion. Particularly when you are linking it with gear price and cable sound. Elsewhere perhaps, but not here.

... most have given up or stopped caring in the face of an intransigent music industry.

Any solution to this problem must take the business realities of the music business into account, or it will fail. This is what I consider to be the lesson to be learnt from the loudness wars. The main actors are in it for the money, and no amount of appealing will change this. Idealists, whether they are the artists, or music-lovers, or mastering engineers, or other kinds of activists, will only get exploited, or at best ignored.

I had a read of that thread - thanks for posting it. At reply #9 you were basically fighting off a hostile audience picking irrelevant holes in the idea. Floating point would be a very good idea IMO, with the standard mandating a min/max extent number in the header - to remove the +/- 1.0 convention in current WAVs.

Thanks for taking the effort to read it. I'm not yet sure you have understood the point I was trying to make there. You are mentioning a standard, implying that something is to be mandated. Which standard are you referring to, what exactly should it mandate and why, who would be in a position to mandate someting like this, and how would one ensure it is being complied with?

Since the CD many viable file formats have been created, including ODF (http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-why-the-odf-vs-ooxml-battle-matters/) which is rather more complex than an array of IEEE floats and a trivial header.

I don't think there's a lack of file formats, or streaming formats, which would be capable of transporting floating point audio. The technical capabilities are there for quite a while now. Taking up floating point as a distribution format is a strategical problem, not a technical one.

Perhaps Denial is at play here - people I guess don't want to know the truth about the music they are playing.

That may be the case with many people, but the people involved in the discussion here are much more likely to have known the sad truth for a long time. They don't question the problem, they question your approach to solve it.

CuteStudio - or Graham, whatever you prefer - your declipper comes too late. About 20 years too late. Besides, one can already buy a commercialized version of a DeClipper, it's included in iZotope RX. Far more expensive, yes. But comes without the nonsense.

CDs able to be declipped started to appear around the early '90s. They continued to be produced until the early 2000s. After that, mastering engineers were slowly switching to brickwall limiting lacking any clipping.

Nowadays, they may use a combination of analogue tape saturation, brickwall limiting, phase manipulations, dynamic equalizers, dynamic compressors. For roughly 10 years now, I've rarely seen a clipped CD. So what is there to "repair"?

Speaking about: you are not making clear if A) clipped samples are audible and B) that you cannot repair/restore them. The word I missed the most in all your talk, talk, talk is "interpolation". Because that is the only thing left to you. Your software guesses, nothing more. The results are therefore guesswork and may sound well to your intended audience. But don't try and pass them off as scientific. And did you really think you could get away with blatant and obvious advertising in a Wiki?

Try computeraudiophile, they will be much more welcoming, I assure you.

Because it's easy to make a loud CD without introducing any clipping.  I've done it with a few recorded MIDIs using the free version of Stereo Tool and that's an application designed for being as loud as other radio stations and even louder if one wants to. 

Yes, it is easy to do that. At the limit you avoid flat-topped waveforms but end up with bumpy-top waveforms which can fool a declipper that doesn't use a histogram. The difference in sound will have a little less HF hash but it's still not HiFi.

It's also easy to transfer music to 16bit without detectable compression or clipping like they did up to the 1990s, but however much people bleat about 16bits being good enough on HA it doesn't cut it when you have dynamic source material like this:

(https://s29.postimg.org/oxiuu72x3/Screen_Shot_2017_01_11_at_09_46_27.png)
(Saturn The Bringer Of Old Age)

There's parts on here that average  -48dB which on a 16bit format is using 8 bits. Is 8 bits still HiFi? I suspect this is one subtle driver of the loudness war (A war we've lost BTW).

I can imagine the methods and stuff used by more experienced professionals who do this for a living can do a 100 times better job at it than me and have access to tons of expensive tools at their disposal.

Imagination is a wonderful thing.

I've bought CDs in the last few years of recent albums and found no signs of clipping but they were loud nonetheless.

Which ones?

Please give a couple of these clean albums names - just one of 'last few years of recent albums' please. It sounds like you have several to choose from there so it should be easy, looking forward to seeing what you choose.

It will be great to find 2 albums are cleanly recorded: thanks in advance.

It's also easy to transfer music to 16bit without detectable compression or clipping like they did up to the 1990s, but however much people bleat about 16bits being good enough on HA it doesn't cut it when you have dynamic source material like this:

(https://s29.postimg.org/oxiuu72x3/Screen_Shot_2017_01_11_at_09_46_27.png)
(Saturn The Bringer Of Old Age)

There's parts on here that average  -48dB which on a 16bit format is using 8 bits. Is 8 bits still HiFi? I suspect this is one subtle driver of the loudness war (A war we've lost BTW).

-48 dBFS is still 48 dB above the noise floor of 16 bit PCM audio. In a very quiet listening room with a background noise of just 30 dB SPL, those quiet parts would have to be played louder than 78dB SPL at the very minimum before the noise floor would even begin to be a factor. Background noise is quite well-masked by musical content, so as long as the music's playing, the noise is inaudible. Even if it is audible, it's just inoffensive tape hiss-like white noise.

And played back at those levels, the peaks in that recording would be hitting 126 dB SPL. This isn't exactly practical or even possible for most people, in their homes.

In other words, even with the rather low average level of the quiet sections in that piece, the background noise from using 16 bit is a non-issue.

And besides that, the natural noise from microphones and other analog hardware involved in the recording would drown out the quantization noise, anyway.

So I am a horse to taste your water.

I ripped a track and manipulated it by several means:

original: original file.
-6db: simple -6dB volume decrease.
cassette: record the original to a cassette and re-digitize it.
phase -90: phase shift -90 degrees with normalization to avoid processing clip.
phase +10: phase shift +10 degrees with normalization to avoid processing clip.

The free version offers a tool to analyse clipping and dynamics with a rating. See the screenshots attached.

In a short summary:
-6db: Fair
cassette: Ace
original: Poor
phase +10: Good
phase -90: Ace

So In CuteStudio's opinion, the best declippers should be a cassette deck or a phase shifter, while a simple volume reduction can also fairly solve the clipping problem. Good to know this fact since I don't need to buy the full version.

Some analysis are disabled, maybe a limitation of the free version. If you are going to tell me the full version has a more accurate analyser then sorry, it means the free version is a scam to fool and scare users in order to encourage them to buy the full version. Also I wonder how accurate your "Hall of fame/shame" in your homepage is since apparently the analysis is based on your own algorithm.

I also disagree the name of your software completely disappeared in the wiki but I agree you should be banned to edit because of your dishonesty. How about this? Some other members put an entry of SeeDeclip but warn about the inaccurate nature of the quality analyser by linking to this thread? It is quite predictable that someone interested in studying about clipping is also interested to know how to declip, adding this part into the wiki can prevent people being fooled by scamwares.

To conclude, the severity of clipping and loudness war in the music industry will not automatically make your software become useful, accurate and honest.

4792]

Quote from: pelmazo on 2017-01-09 19:09:45

The main problem is the loudness war itself, which leads to overcompression in mastering, which affects the way the material sounds, even when there is no clipping problem. There are dynamic range databases for quite some time now, to allow people to make an educated guess before buying. They have their own serious problems, as we all should know by now.

Agreed 100%.

You agree, yet seem to miss my point entirely. I was trying to tell you that your tool and your general approach doesn't solve the problem. You can't agree with me and in the next sentence carry on advocating your tool. There's a large cognitive dissonance here.
[/quote]
No cognitive dissonance, I just don't think you've understood what SeeDeClip4 is about which is probably my fault. Could you please read the last part of the post #17, starting "Reply #17 – Today at 05:16:37 PM".

Here - and on the main webpage (http://www.cutestudio.net/ at point 1 in the first numbered list) - it's quite clear that the main purpose of SeeDeClip4 over the previous V3 'declip only' software is to identify the quality of the the recordings so you can select and play the better mastered ones.

If you still disagree you'll have to define the phrase 'solve the problem' first, it could mean:

• To avoid playing damaged audio tracks
• To repair damaged audio tracks
• To buy every music company and force them to master music properly

Your dissonance appears to originate from 2 and 3, whereas I am clearly pointing to 1), with a little 2).

Quote

I suspect it's a taboo subject. HA's 'holy cow'.

That's almost certainly the wrong suspicion. Particularly when you are linking it with gear price and cable sound. Elsewhere perhaps, but not here.

There are several hostile replies on this very thread where people are asserting their faith that their waveforms are not clipped, and then refusing to even name the album/track - much less post up the waveform. This has all the hallmarks of denial and taboo.

Quote

... most have given up or stopped caring in the face of an intransigent music industry.

Any solution to this problem must take the business realities of the music business into account, or it will fail.

What we see is falling CD sales - a 24bit/96k DVD format could have made downloading and MP3s laborious and buying silver discs worthwhile. SACD was the window for this but the music sabotaged it. This hasn't helped them one bit and now it's too late because download speeds and disk space have grown to make these readily pirateable too.
They also engineered the dip in mastering quality that made easily copied MP3 as good as the CD and thus wrecked their revenue.

The business reality is that the music industry missed a huge re-buying opportunity as big as the move from LP to CD and encouraged copying by damaging their 'flagship' product of the time so MP3s sounded just as good. It's a lose-lose strategy for them which they are still struggling from.

Instead of LP -> CD -> SACD we went LP -> CD -> MP3. How did this make money for them?

The other industry that suffered of course was the consumer electronics audio industry, because when the dynamics were steam-rollered out HiFi became redundant:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/07/08/23/1219205/the-loudness-war-and-the-future-of-music
"well, why get anything good to play it on"

Quote

I had a read of that thread - thanks for posting it. At reply #9 you were basically fighting off a hostile audience picking irrelevant holes in the idea. Floating point would be a very good idea IMO, with the standard mandating a min/max extent number in the header - to remove the +/- 1.0 convention in current WAVs.

Thanks for taking the effort to read it. I'm not yet sure you have understood the point I was trying to make there. You are mentioning a standard, implying that something is to be mandated. Which standard are you referring to, what exactly should it mandate and why, who would be in a position to mandate someting like this, and how would one ensure it is being complied with?

"the standard" was referring to your proposal: A standard based on 32bit floats so there's no magnitude limit.
I assume you'd already thought about the other questions - I'm not sure why I'd know the answers, it wasn't my proposal.

Quote

Perhaps Denial is at play here - people I guess don't want to know the truth about the music they are playing.

That may be the case with many people, but the people involved in the discussion here are much more likely to have known the sad truth for a long time. They don't question the problem, they question your approach to solve it.

You're the only one saying that, no one else has admitted to any clipping at all, their recent pop albums are all clip free.
So clip free that no album name or track has been mentioned in case I analyse it for them and tell them how damaged it is :D.

I ripped a track and manipulated it by several means:

original: original file.
-6db: simple -6dB volume decrease.
cassette: record the original to a cassette and re-digitize it.
phase -90: phase shift -90 degrees with normalization to avoid processing clip.
phase +10: phase shift +10 degrees with normalization to avoid processing clip.

The free version offers a tool to analyse clipping and dynamics with a rating. See the screenshots attached.

In a short summary:
-6db: Fair
cassette: Ace
original: Poor
phase +10: Good
phase -90: Ace

Thanks for doing that.

-6dB
It says this is clean, which is obviously isn't and marks it down because it's quiet.
I'll have to see why it's not bothered to detect these.

Cassette
I can see that the cassette does indeed look like it's mastered correctly, no flat tops and no issues in the histogram.
The envelope has also lost its straight edges so it's definitely been altered by the journey.

It's good enough to fool me when I look at the waveform - can you spot a flat-top?
It looks like the band-limiting of the cassette has rounded off all of those edges, if your amplifier and speakers do the same then you should be just fine without any de clipping shouldn't you?

What does it sound like? Is it easier to listen to?

Digital (original)
I can see just under 8,400 clips of which the worst is around 50 samples - so an average modern pop, the ppm (concentration of clipping) is quite high though.
You chopped off the end of the histogram but the blank bit I can see and the nature of the waveform indicates minimal compression - it's really just been clipped - so fixing that would be fairly successful.

Waveforms with EQ
The de-clipper detects flat tops, as you can see your EQ has tilted the flat tops so they are no longer flat.
This is entirely expected behaviour because now these tracks are not technically clipped.

So In CuteStudio's opinion, the best declippers should be a cassette deck or a phase shifter

The declipper is looking for flat-tops on the waveform. If they are removed by EQ/bandpass then it will not detect them.
This is not a method of declipping, it's just a method of smoothing out or tilting the flat tops, which is interesting but what does it actually prove?

Some analysis are disabled, maybe a limitation of the free version. If you are going to tell me the full version has a more accurate analyser then sorry, it means the free version is a scam to fool and scare users in order to encourage them to buy the full version.

The fixes are disabled in the free version. If you'd like a free declipper you can choose one from the multitude out there on the internet like This One (https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx.html). You are also free to look at exactly the same waveform in Audacity so I'm not sure what you think is a 'scam'.
The implication is that I should make everything I write available for free, perhaps you do this but I see no motive for me to do so.

It also seems running your audio through a free three-head tape machine is your favoured solution.

Also I wonder how accurate your "Hall of fame/shame" in your homepage is since apparently the analysis is based on your own algorithm.

-6dB peak digital tracks are extremely rare, but in fact if you look at the bottom of the 'Hall of Shame' page you'll see that was created with V3 which has a different clip detection method.

I agree you should be banned to edit because of your dishonesty.

Can you please point out this dishonesty?
If you are referring to the claim that 'at a rough estimate 99% of modern pop CDs are clipped' please note that I still haven't had anyone post a track or album that isn't.

How about this? Some other members put an entry of SeeDeclip but warn about the inaccurate nature of the quality analyser by linking to this thread? It is quite predictable that someone interested in studying about clipping is also interested to know how to declip, adding this part into the wiki can prevent people being fooled by scamwares.

Please do, you are welcome to edit the wiki how you see fit. This thread is also the defacto HA resource on SeeDeClip4 now so your suggestion makes sense.

Discussion of the quality of clip analysis is a good, healthy thing and I have no objection to that.
As bugs are found or better algorithms appear they will be incorporated, just as with any software.

I'm grateful that you actually ran it and gave me feedback: Thank-you.

The dishonesty of your analyser.

If someone post the screenshots like I do in some forums and criticizing the quality of modern pop, or which specific pressing or release of the same album is the best (based on the analysis result) and so on, can your analyser actually tell which version sounds more dynamic and less clipped to someone?

I listened to the files I posted, apart from the inevitable noise and frequency response change in the cassette version, other versions sound identical to my ears, I mean I cannot ABX them after level matching. You asked me to see flat-tops, yes I can clearly see them but how about listen to them? Actually the cassette version sounds worse than other versions in my opinion due the limitation of cassette technology, obviously not "Ace" quality. It doesn't sound more dynamic, unclipped or pleasing to me.

I can predict if I capture the waveform of the full version of SeeDeclip and analyze it the quality score will also greatly improved due to the flawed algorithm of your analyzer. So it also lies about the effectiveness or your declipper, as well as a cassette deck, a phase shifter or declippers from other competitors. Is it honest?

No cognitive dissonance, I just don't think you've understood what SeeDeClip4 is about which is probably my fault. Could you please read the last part of the post #17, starting "Reply #17 – Today at 05:16:37 PM".

Here - and on the main webpage (http://www.cutestudio.net/ at point 1 in the first numbered list) - it's quite clear that the main purpose of SeeDeClip4 over the previous V3 'declip only' software is to identify the quality of the the recordings so you can select and play the better mastered ones.

If you still disagree you'll have to define the phrase 'solve the problem' first, it could mean:

• To avoid playing damaged audio tracks
• To repair damaged audio tracks
• To buy every music company and force them to master music properly

Your dissonance appears to originate from 2 and 3, whereas I am clearly pointing to 1), with a little 2).

No, it doesn't originate from that. I did understand that you are trying to provide a tool for showing people the quality problems of the material they want to play. I maintain that this doesn't work. The dynamic range databases have tried to do something similar, and they haven't reached their goal either. The loudness war can't be terminated in this manner. Your hope that people will be more conscious in their buying decisions after having seen the output of your tool is, I am confident, in vain. Your tool won't have an appreciable effect on what source material people buy, and hence no business impact that could cause a change to the loudness war.

There are several hostile replies on this very thread where people are asserting their faith that their waveforms are not clipped, and then refusing to even name the album/track - much less post up the waveform. This has all the hallmarks of denial and taboo.

It has the hallmarks of opposition. It is you who is trying to find explanations for their opposition that puts the blame on them. You don't seem to be willing to accept the possibility that the fault is with you. If anything, it is your denial.

What we see is falling CD sales - a 24bit/96k DVD format could have made downloading and MP3s laborious and buying silver discs worthwhile. SACD was the window for this but the music sabotaged it. This hasn't helped them one bit and now it's too late because download speeds and disk space have grown to make these readily pirateable too.

They also engineered the dip in mastering quality that made easily copied MP3 as good as the CD and thus wrecked their revenue.

I think you are shaping the facts to suit your theory.

The music industry never wanted MP3, it was the consumers who liked it. It allowed them to have as much of their music as possible on a portable player (iPod etc.) with limited storage space and sufficient quality. MP3 was an enabling technology for this, which was a technology that wasn't under sufficient control by the music industry to prevent it from becoming adopted. It was also a technology that lent itself to streaming on the internet, which helped the emergence of internet radio, podcasts and all this stuff. All this developed under the weary eyes of the music industry, without them being able to stop it.

Overcompression and loudness maximisation actually hurts MP3 even more than the CD format itself. The clipping problems become worse with MP3. You have it the wrong way up here, because this lowering of CD quality didn't make the MP3 more competitive in quality. If anything, it could have been a trick to discredit MP3 against the CD. I'm not actually going as far as asserting this. I don't think the balance between MP3 and CD had anything to do with the declining CD quality.

The loudness war thrives on the realization, that most people buy records because of the music that's on them, and not the quality of the recording. And the realization that if two tracks are pitched one against the other, the slightly louder one is usually preferred. Both are truisms of the music business which are much older than the CD, and they are sufficient to drive the loudness war. It has got nothing to do with formats. It means that producers are inclined to sacrifice quality if they can get loudness in return, because they figure that this will give them better sales. It is only here where formats come into play, because the properties of a format determine the conditions for exchanging quality for loudness, hence they determine what the producer can do and with what effect.

The SACD flopped because of three reasons, IMHO.

One reason lies in its copy protection, which prevented people from doing the kind of things they had come to expect they could do. For example, why would I have to buy the same thing twice just for being able to play it at home and in the car?

The second reason was the extra CD-format layer, which required them to provide two versions of the same thing, one in CD format and one in SACD format. This sounds like a good idea at first, but it doubles mastering cost, and is fraught with problems. For example, you are in danger of showing to people that both actually sound the same, if they are both mastered well. If you put the CD version at an artificial disadvantage, it also becomes apparent. This has all ingredients for producers to shoot themselves in the foot, and they duly did.

The third factor, of course, is that there also was competition in the form of DVD audio, which creates the kind of confusion in the market which makes people wait for the market to sort itself out before they start buying stuff.

The irony of all this is that the LP now has a second spring because of their complete failure to kill the CD off. The LP became the audiophile medium again, purely because it was the minority format that could be targeted to quality-conscious consumers, and because the mastering for the LP doesn't easily tolerate the crimes that can be committed on a CD. This is not a testament to the inherent qualities of the LP, rather it is the testament of what a complete cockup the music business has become as a result of those failed CD replacement strategies.

"the standard" was referring to your proposal: A standard based on 32bit floats so there's no magnitude limit.
I assume you'd already thought about the other questions - I'm not sure why I'd know the answers, it wasn't my proposal.

I wasn't going to mandate anything, because I don't know anybody who could. The usage of the floating point format was meant to be an offer to producers who want to have more loudness without a sacrifice in quality. I figured that they would want such a format, not the least because it offers them a way out of a dilemma they have shed many public tears about. With this format, I opined, the market would sort itself out, without requiring anybody to rule, which is precisely why I think it can work.

You're the only one saying that, no one else has admitted to any clipping at all, their recent pop albums are all clip free.
So clip free that no album name or track has been mentioned in case I analyse it for them and tell them how damaged it is :D.

They try to tell you that they don't have the problem you say they have. I don't think you will have much chance of convincing them otherwise by telling them you know better. It can only come across as arrogance.

Also, if you want to show how good your declipper is, release a standalone demo version with time limit or adding a tone every minute or so. In this way users can really try them with the audio files they have, instead of showing unreliable statistics or ratings.

Alexey Lukin from iZotope in fact, is a member of this forum, he also talked about his product sometimes, as well as John Siau from Benchmark and so on, yet they are not unwelcome. Do a search on their posts and see why and don't ask me why.

I ripped a track and manipulated it by several means:

original: original file.
-6db: simple -6dB volume decrease.
cassette: record the original to a cassette and re-digitize it.
phase -90: phase shift -90 degrees with normalization to avoid processing clip.
phase +10: phase shift +10 degrees with normalization to avoid processing clip.

The free version offers a tool to analyse clipping and dynamics with a rating. See the screenshots attached.

Uh ... they are not possibly the same signal, are they?

Also, I am not so sure that it should be considered a failure to overlook signals that do not reach the full digital volume. The algorithm should be able to find clipping even if you bump down a little bit, but the application could very well just scan near the 0 dB mark - I mean, who will on purpose compress in order to boost volume up to the maximum only then to reduce by 6 dB?

I mean, who will on purpose compress in order to boost volume up to the maximum only then to reduce by 6 dB?

I've found music like this, although I don't think it was reduced by so much. It was on a compilation CD. The volume was boosted during the original mastering, then reduced for the compilation.

Also, I am not so sure that it should be considered a failure to overlook signals that do not reach the full digital volume. The algorithm should be able to find clipping even if you bump down a little bit, but the application could very well just scan near the 0 dB mark - I mean, who will on purpose compress in order to boost volume up to the maximum only then to reduce by 6 dB?

I can give you a real example. The OST of a PSX game called R-Type Delta

I have the CD and here are the screenshots of the first 3 tracks in flac. The first track looks pretty close to -6dB isn't it?

The whole lossy album is available on Youtube, of course the peaks will be different due to the compression, just post it so you know what music they are. If it violates TOS9 please remove the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpFV7UgypqA&list=PLXSaJ1VYkIYuzScqXdQahXAmgI7ul7o33

The purpose to reduce so much volume on track 1, is to balance out the tracks in the same album so listeners don't need to touch the volume knob. The dynamic works on the first track I suppose, is based on the artistic decision of the mastering engineer.

The phase shifted files are indeed from the same source, you can try it yourself, it is totally unsurprising.

I don't want to speculate in which circumstances this analyzer, or another one, is reliable because I am going to listen to them if I want to.

The phase shifted files are indeed from the same source, you can try it yourself, it is totally unsurprising.

I do not dispute that they originate from the same file, but they do not look like the same time - the legend suggests they are thirty or seventy seconds apart, isn't it so?

Quote from: bennetng on 2017-01-12 11:48:10

The phase shifted files are indeed from the same source, you can try it yourself, it is totally unsurprising.

I do not dispute that they originate from the same file, but they do not look like the same time - the legend suggests they are thirty or seventy seconds apart, isn't it so?

Oh I understood what you said. The purpose of my screenshots are not on the zoomed waveforms, but the ratings and statistics because Audacity or any other wave editor can also display the waveform, not specific to SeeDeclip.

Apropos DR database. Besides endless pointless vinyl entries we now get even more pointless garbage in. Maybe added there for reasons others edit a wiki...
"These downloaded audio files have been processed using declipping software and is NOT what you buy. In order to get these DR-values you need to process them yourself. This listing is just to show those who plan doing the work that it will indeed give a more dynamic sound" (http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/121706)

The irony of all this is that the LP now has a second spring because of their complete failure to kill the CD off. The LP became the audiophile medium again, purely because it was the minority format that could be targeted to quality-conscious consumers, and because the mastering for the LP doesn't easily tolerate the crimes that can be committed on a CD. This is not a testament to the inherent qualities of the LP, rather it is the testament of what a complete cockup the music business has become as a result of those failed CD replacement strategies.

That really resonated with me. I got into vinyl for this reason. I spent between 2500-3000$ until I had a setup that I consider to be on par with digital. Now I rip my vinyl into the PC so I can conveniently listen to it.

It's ridiculous, but it sometimes offers the best version of the music, even though it's technically the worse format. I just bought some LPs, they have sticker on the front that says "Mastered for vinyl for optimal listening quality" - one of my favorite bands has never sounded better.

Sadly, they don't offer the vinyl master as 24bit download, so I have no choice if I want the best quality.

Sadly, they don't offer the vinyl master as 24bit download, so I have no choice if I want the best quality.

They almost do - check out the Mastered for iTunes quality tracks, Apple (a computer company) has done the same as I: - looked at the waveform quality and noticed a serious problem. They thankfully were big enough to do something about it. It's expensive to re-buy your catalogue but money far better spent than many HiFi 'improvements'.

I was hoping someone would mention this but I guess they were too busy throwing spears at the heretic who dared have a) an opinion and b) evidence..

https://www.justmastering.com/article-masteredforitunes.php

Use Google to read the discussions about this.

Also, if you want to show how good your declipper is, release a standalone demo version with time limit or adding a tone every minute or so. In this way users can really try them with the audio files they have, instead of showing unreliable statistics or ratings.

Good suggestion and I was planning exactly that, it was in V3 but hasn't made it into V4 yet. It might have by now but this thread has used up quite a bit of my limited time.

V4 is still a very new piece of software and I was really just adding V4 to the Wiki and fixing some errors in the Clipping section in passing. I'd expected it to be edited and perhaps some discussion in the 'Discuss' tab on the wiki, the banning however made that impossible. I have no problem with discussion, but censorship is a growing problem in our society at all levels.
If I was really ready for it to be scrutinised and tested by HA I would have put a post into the News section, but events conspired to lead to an all points attack by multiple people that I wasn't prepared for. I still will add it to News sections on other forums when I consider it stable enough, but probably not at HA.

Still, it's an interesting social experiment into tribal behaviour, quite fascinating.
Greynol is still silent BTW.

The dishonesty of your analyser.

The dishonesty of my free analyser, that you've now used several times for free?
Do you have a dishonest power drill at home?

If someone post the screenshots like I do in some forums and criticizing the quality of modern pop, or which specific pressing or release of the same album is the best (based on the analysis result) and so on, can your analyser actually tell which version sounds more dynamic and less clipped to someone?

The clip analysis, dynamic range and histogram give in my view a very complete picture of the mastering quality. It's possible the rating may be improved one day - very few things are as good as they'll ever be - Windows 3.0 and DOS 6.0 taught us that.

I asked for someone to find an unclipped modern pop track and you showed me a track with several thousand clips - some of them quite visible and severe. What am I missing in this picture?

I listened to the files I posted, apart from the inevitable noise and frequency response change in the cassette version, other versions sound identical to my ears, I mean I cannot ABX them after level matching. You asked me to see flat-tops, yes I can clearly see them but how about listen to them? Actually the cassette version sounds worse than other versions in my opinion due the limitation of cassette technology, obviously not "Ace" quality. It doesn't sound more dynamic, unclipped or pleasing to me.

You are confusing mastering quality with sound quality.
I can have a perfectly mastered recording of a cheap transistor radio, it doesn't mean it's good sound does it?

If you are happy to listen to sound that you can plainly see to be distorted then you clearly don't need to pay for any declipping capability or even buy better mastered music. So we've just saved you some money which can only be a good thing right?

I can predict if I capture the waveform of the full version of SeeDeclip and analyze it the quality score will also greatly improved due to the flawed algorithm of your analyzer. So it also lies about the effectiveness or your declipper, as well as a cassette deck, a phase shifter or declippers from other competitors. Is it honest?

The analyser didn't look flawed to me. It detected the flat-tops you had perfectly and even showed you where they were.
It didn't bother looking at the lower level waveform, I suggest you update the program if you want to stay up to date.

Quote

"the standard" was referring to your proposal: A standard based on 32bit floats so there's no magnitude limit.
I assume you'd already thought about the other questions - I'm not sure why I'd know the answers, it wasn't my proposal.

I wasn't going to mandate anything, because I don't know anybody who could. The usage of the floating point format was meant to be
:

I'd suggest you read up on "Mastered For iTunes".

I used (past tense means uninstalled) it not because I am a potential customer, just because I saw the disputes in this thread and wanted to verify them. Now you replied in a way like you gave me something for free and I really got a benefit. I felt disgusted about you.

The waveform, as you and I mentioned, will be the same even if I don't use your software. But the rating, and statistics of clipped samples can be dramatically changed by simple manipulations. Be careful about your wordings, for example, Adobe Audition says "possible clipped samples" in its statistics. Without comparing with the original source it is impossible to tell if samples are "absolutely" clipped.

There are also stuffs like RMS, LU, crest factor and so on in other software, they are based on some algorithms and just displayed them as information. These are factual stuffs and how people think about them are based on their personal opinion. The controversial point about your software is you actually have a rating like Ace, good, fair and bad. As for the cassette example sure someone can use some hi-end type IV cassettes or even a professional Open reel tape machine to make a dub and make an audible difference, but my point is not about that. The point is I cannot find any improvement in terms of clipping, even if it does not have other audible analog distortions. So your argument is irrelevant.

Also, how do you define "mastering quality"? Is it solely based on clipping, loudness or dynamics? Ask an audiophile, a professional mastering engineer, an indie artist or anyone who has interest in this issue, and see how different their answers are. So this "mastering quality" is also based on what you think, or what your algorithm interprets isn't it? An even worse thing is the rating can be very different even if they are actually indistinguishable after level-matching. Do you see the point?

Your arguing style can give you a small verbal victory sometimes, with the price of losing a lot of your creditability and potential customers. Better hire someone to do the social engineering stuff on forums and spend more time on programming.

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,108668.msg898442.html#msg898442
A small hint for you.

'd suggest you read up on "Mastered For iTunes".

I did. Now what?

Still, it's an interesting social experiment into tribal behaviour, quite fascinating.

You are behaving more and more like a troll. This way you'll not just get kicked from the wiki, but from the forum, too. Perhaps that's what you want, anyway.

Quote from: CuteStudio on 2017-01-14 11:50:23

'd suggest you read up on "Mastered For iTunes".

I did. Now what?

That means you gave him a chance to derail the discussion by talking about floating point,  and he used this chance. Subsequently It also provided a possibility to twist some of your opinions about this issue to justify some of his claim.

The DR database entry i mentioned before is gone for good.
I find this is software from a waveformophile for other waveformophiles and its use is much more limited as it tries to suggest. Spectralophiles may be happy to extend their senses with it ;)

The "Delossifier" for example.
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,92704.msg869359.html#msg869359

In general, videophiles. They may buy a 4k monitor to see hi-res waveforms, with HDR and 10-bit color enabled to see spectrograms.