At 06:12 PM 2/13/01 +0000, D D wrote:
I'm a new user to MAD and it's immediately become my standard for mp3 listening and decoding. The first thing that shook me when using Mad, was something that I never had encountered before, the mp3 clipping indicator. Low-bit distortion is one thing, but high-bit problems is surely a worse one, if not the worst! And when I witnessed Mad reports clipping even with files produced by the best encoders like Lame, this rang a red alert for me: are we constantly exposed to clipping distortion when using winamp's decoder or other decoding apps?
Yes, and the more recent the music, the more likely it is that your average mp3 is clipping, since record producers these days seem intent on compressing the life out of their recordings to increase average volume. Yuck. The mp3 encoding process can add even more clipping, making a bad situation worse. The best solution is to normalize to less than full scale *before* encoding. See my page:
http://fastforward.iwarp.com/norm.html
for a discussion on the audibility of clipping introduced by encoding to mp3.
ff123