I did not actually know this - I thought once the red vertical lines showed in Audacity it was too late! Which wasn't insurmountable - last night I tried amplifying in a copy of the track, then going to the timestamps where clipping showed up and de-amplifying that phrase a bit in the non-amplified track, then plugging Replaygain's db number into Amplify on that track to see if that still grayed out the apply button - if so, then lather rinse repeat. And what a pain in the butt!GrayHouse wrote: ↑February 2nd, 2023, 6:38 amYou may understand this already but it's worth mentioning for others:NicoleJLeBoeuf wrote: ↑February 2nd, 2023, 1:09 am I wound up doing the Normalize style ReplayGain after all, and then using Clip Fix with the lightest touch possible to the problem areas, so as to eliminate the clipping without reducing the volume of those phrases more than necessary, and the result isn't all that bad, but - wow. I will know better going forward!
If you over-amplify (by whatever means) and it causes clipping, the clipped audio is still preserved above the clipping line - you just can't see the tops of the peaks anymore. In fact you can zoom out on your vertical scale to show a range greater than -1 to +1. So you can perfectly restore the clipped audio by simply deamplifying the clipped peaks. In that situation I often just select the syllable(s) or phrase around the clipped peak (remember to adjust to a zero crossing) and then deamplify by a few dB. I have macros for Amplify by +1dB or -1dB attached to shortcut keys to do the volume adjustment easily. As you said, that's essentially what the Compressor or Limiter does, but if there are just a few peaks to edit I'll often do it by hand.
Clipping only 'crystalises' when you Export your audio. If you save your work-in-progress as an Audacity project file (rather than Exporting the audio) the project file will preserve the clipped audio (so you can recover the clipping simply by deamplifying*) whereas the Exported audio will be permanently clipped so you have to resort to other means such as Clip Fix which may have mixed results. It's one of the few advantages of using Audacity project files, although I admit I use Export.
*Obviously we're only talking about audio that's clipped during editing. Audio that's clipped at the recording stage is a very different problem.
ETA: Thanks to Anne for explaining the volume adjustments on the cataloging process
For what it's worth, I do everything in Audacity project files, and I duplicate my track to preserve the raw original recording before I apply Noise Reduction and De-Clicker, and then I duplicate again before compression and amplification procedures. That last duplicated track is so that I don't have to do those 8 minutes of de-clicker again if something goes wrong with the amplification. (I do it on the whole track because it would take longer to try to find each and every wet mouth noise to de-click. I just make sure I have something to do while de-clicker runs. Shuttle-tatting, for instance.) Exporting to MP3 is the very, very last step. Well, penultimate step. Last step is running Checker on the MP3.
So it sounds like de-amplifying the clipping points after amplification/loudness normalization/replaygain is a viable solution and I don't have to use Clip Fix after all. And that is fantastic.