Audacious

"Prevent clipping" should be understood in the context of Replay Gain. All it does is to avoid applying a Replay Gain amplification level that would lead to clipping if no further audio processing took place. If you use other audio effects (equalizer, extra stereo, etc.), you can still get clipping.

Inside Audacious, audio samples are processed as floating point values, so neither Replay Gain nor any other effect applies clipping directly. Rather, the clipping takes place at the final stage of converting the floating points to whatever format your sound card uses (e.g. 16-bit PCM). At this stage, values outside the PCM range will result in clipping. "Soft" clipping is an algorithm that attempts to make the clipped signal slightly less jarring. Where simple or "hard" clipping would give you essentially a square wave, soft clipping should sound more like an over-driven analog amplifier.

thank you sir.

i have been trying these clipping settings with several songs. it appears "soft clipping" kicks in every time there is a thumping bass or crisp cymbal. sound kind of lost the 'punch' , mellowed down. i turned this feature off.

foobar2000's advanced limiter seems to perform much better when it comes to 'soft clipping' and still protects the speakers from sudden "squawks" from a faulty audio file. also worth mentioning is kmplayer's 'normalizer' feature. (both are windows' applications)

"prevent clipping" did not mess up the sound quality. from what i understand, it probably kicks in only if file has replay gain tags to it.

off topic , thanks for audacious. it plays music without trying to be a jack of all trades. :::bow to the master:::