Waveform clipping in music (aka NO GOOD!)

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Something I've been against for a while is the loudness war, which typically consists of waveform clipping and dynamic range compression.


Now what KS has to do with it is that 7 songs have clipping in their waveforms, which is NO GOOD. (Luckily though I don't think any of the songs have any dynamic range compression)

• Afternoon
  Daylight
  High Tension
  Moment of Decision
  Out of the Loop
  Parity
  Shadow of the Truth

My guess is that this clipping is not actually intentional, and therefore I would assume could be easily fixed. However, unless you use some evil dynamic range compression, lowering these song's gain values may make them too quiet in comparison to the other songs, so you'd have to adjust ALL the songs.

The easiest way to do this would be via WaveGain (with settings @ 24bits or higher + no dithering), which you would apply before the OGG vorbis conversion.


If you want more proof, I can put up waveform image comparisons of the clipped vs declipped versions - it'll be nowhere as good as the original unclipped waveforms, but it's the closest we can get. It's a total pain for me to make the comparison, but if means getting unclipped audio and KS, it's definitely worth it.

[Nicol Armarfi]

Given that there are so few public sneak-peeks of what's going on in the music side of things, you probably get the impression that we are not doing anything with it. But I assure you that, just like all the writing, art, and programming, we are in fact going back and fixing up problems like this in the old tracks behind the scenes.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Heh, you're right about that. Good to hear!

It's particularly silly for games and VNs to participate in the loudness war since they usually have a built-in volume level coded in.

[Warwick]

Yeah, a while back Delta was working on the gain/clipping issues and posting random stuff on IRC. He was a little miffed that Ren'Py didn't support WaveGain.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Are you sure you don't mean Replay Gain?

WaveGain actually physically adjusts the gain level to 89db, hence why I HIGHLY recommended upsampling to 24bits and/or higher during the WaveGain process (and obviously before the OGG vorbis conversion).

[Warwick]

Probably. My bad, hard to keep track.

[Guest]

Somewhat relevant; apparently there's a new volume-averaging standard that's even more accurate that Replay Gain: EBU R128.

More info: http://tech.ebu.ch/loudness

Apparently Foobar2000 v1.16 and later uses this for its Replay Gain scanner. (note that, by default, fb2k applies WaveGain when you convert a song that has Replay Gain tags already)

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Dang it, that last post was me - I didn't realize that I wasn't logged in.