Topic: How to fix clipped audio from clapping in Audacity

[carrington]

Hey all.  I taped a bluegrass show in which there really was no significant PA for amplification.  Needless to say, the music was fairly subdued and I had to really raise the recording levels to simply peak around -10 to -8 db.  This was ok until people clapped between songs and sometimes during songs...the result was total overload and clipping.  Is it fixable, and if so, how?

thanks!
C.

[carrington]

I figured it out.  Used hard limiter just on the clapping...good stuff!

[Marshall7]

That's how I do it, too.

[rjp]

I'll sometimes do that, but often I find that using auto-duck to temporarily drop the levels can work as well. Much depends on how loud the applause is relative to the music, and whether the music resumes while the audience is still clapping.

Sometimes I'll just lightly trim the applause peaks, so that I can get an extra 2-3 dB when normalizing (I usually record classical).

The easiest way I found to use auto-duck is to create a separate monaural audio track, fill it with a continuous tone, and mute it.