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Hi. I recorded my vocal and guitar track and they clip up to about 8b too hot. Any way to reduce the recorded track to give me more headroom for playback?
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How do you know it's 8dB of clipping? ...When the peaks are clipped there's no way of knowing the "original" wave height or shape.
There are "de clippers" or "clip repair" plug-ins, and they may be worth a try and they may reduce the sound of the distortion, but like I said the actual information is lost.
Of course, you'll have to reduce the levels (eventually) to accommodate the "restored" peaks.
Pros typically record at -12 to -18dB. You don't need that much headroom. Nothing bad happens when you get close to 0dB, but the point is it's OK to leave lots of headroom (especially if you are recording at 24-bits.). In the old days of analog tape you had to record "hot" to overcome tape noise, and analog tape is more forgiving of hot signals because it tends to soft-clip. But this is digital... No tape noise!
Also, mixing is done by summation. If you have separate drum & guitar tracks, the levels will be higher after mixing. (Of course, we have faders so it's more of a weighted average than simple summing.)
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Any way to reduce the recorded track to give me more headroom for playback?
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You don't need "playback headroom", although some people worry about "inter sample peaks" so if you like you can normalize (or limit) to -1dB or so.
You can precisely "set" the rendered peaks with normalization (it may take a separate mastering step after rendering to floating-point stereo). Or some people use a limiter to precisely control/limit the peaks.
But I'd take it easy on the limiting if you're starting-out with clipped files!
"Internally", REAPER uses floating-point which means it can go way-way over 0dB, and for all practical purposes it has no upper or lower limits. But you can still clip your DAC during monitoring/playback or your rendered file can be clipped.