[mad-user] Clipping - Some naive (?) questions

[ff123]

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