Quote:
as loud as it can go without distorting.
|
This won't help you that much, but...
- REAPER itself uses floating-point internally and it won't clip (won't distort).
- You can clip your DAC if your "digital volume" is too high (if it goes over 0dB) but
that only affects your monitoring where occasional clipping shouldn't be a big issue. And, you can help to prevent that by leaving some headroom in the digital signal, and if you need it louder crank-up the analog volume control on your monitors/amplifier.
- "Regular" WAV & FLAC files will clip if you go over 0dB, but if you render to floating-point WAV* they will happily go way-way over 0dB. So, one approach is to render to floating-point, then open the floating-point file and normalize (possibly as part of your "mastering").
...Some people use a limiter on their master-bus to set the peaks. But if you don't want to do that, you'll probably want to take the extra step of re-opening the rendered file and normalizing to bring the levels up
or down for 0dB (or near 0dB) peaks.
* You shouldn't
distribute a file that goes over 0dB because your listeners will get clipping if they play at full digital volume into their DAC.