Clipped audio - the crackly, crunchy distortion you get when a recording was too loud going in - is often fixable, because a declipper can reconstruct the flattened tops of the waveform and restore a rounded peak. That works well for light to moderate clipping caught the odd time on transients. But it is reconstruction, not magic: when clipping is severe and sustained, so much of the original signal was thrown away that no tool can invent it back cleanly. The honest rule is that a little clipping repairs beautifully, and a lot means you should re-record.
What clipping actually is
Every recording chain has a ceiling - the loudest level it can represent. When the incoming signal tries to go above that ceiling, it cannot, so the peak gets sliced off flat, turning a smooth curve into a hard plateau. Those squared-off tops introduce harsh high-frequency harmonics, which your ear hears as crackle, fuzz or crunch, worst on the loudest moments.
There are two flavours. Digital clipping happens when the signal exceeds 0 dBFS inside your interface or recorder - the peaks hit a hard digital wall. Analog clipping happens earlier, when a mic preamp or the mic itself is overdriven before the sound is even converted. Digital clipping is the recoverable kind, because the shape below the ceiling is intact and only the tips are missing. Analog overdrive is baked into the capture and is far harder to undo.
How to tell if it's really clipping
Look at the waveform. Clipping shows unmistakable flat plateaus where round peaks should be, and the distortion is loudest on the biggest transients - a shouted word, a snare hit - while quiet passages stay clean. That pattern is the tell. If instead the whole recording has a warbly, swirly, underwater crunch regardless of level, that is codec distortion from a low-bitrate file or a voice app, and a declipper will not help. For that and other kinds, see how to fix distorted audio.
Fixing it: declip first
A declip process finds the flat-topped regions and rebuilds a plausible curved peak by interpolating from the intact waveform on either side. On light clipping the result can be genuinely clean - the crackle vanishes and you would never know. Run it as the very first step, before any noise reduction or EQ, because clipping is a distortion of the raw waveform and every later process works better on a repaired signal.
Sauce's Audio Repair runs a declip pass automatically, so the flattened peaks get rebuilt as part of a single cleanup rather than something you have to dial in by hand. After declipping, a declipped peak sometimes overshoots, so follow with a gentle limiter or a small gain reduction to keep the rebuilt transients under control.
One thing a declipper cannot fix is the harshness that clipping already burned into the midrange and highs. The squaring-off generated extra harmonics up around 2 to 6 kHz that live on even after the peaks are rebuilt, so a declipped take can still sound a touch edgy. A gentle dynamic EQ or de-harsh in that region takes the edge off without dulling the whole recording. Do it after the declip, not instead of it - the declip removes the crackle, the de-harsh removes the leftover glassiness.
What is recoverable and what is not
- Light digital clipping - occasional squared peaks on the loudest words. Repairs cleanly and often completely.
- Moderate digital clipping - regular clipping across many transients. A declipper gets you most of the way, though close listening may reveal some residual edge.
- Severe, sustained clipping - the waveform is flat-topped for long stretches. Too much information is gone; the reconstruction guesses, and it sounds like it. This is a re-record.
- Analog overdrive - the preamp or mic was slammed. The distortion is part of the captured sound, not a flat ceiling to rebuild, so declipping cannot remove it.
When to re-record instead of repairing
Reach for a fresh take when the clipping is severe and continuous rather than the occasional peak, when the distortion is analog overdrive baked in at capture, or when the part is a lead vocal or hero element that has to sound pristine. A clean retake takes a few minutes and beats an hour of imperfect surgery every time. Repair is for salvaging a performance you cannot recreate - a live moment, a one-take idea, an interview - not for rescuing sloppy gain-staging you could simply redo.
A quick step-by-step
- Check the waveform for flat plateaus to confirm it is clipping and not codec crunch or overdrive.
- Run a declip process first, before any other repair, to rebuild the squared peaks.
- Follow with a gentle limiter or slight gain reduction to tame any rebuilt peaks that overshoot.
- Then move on to noise, hum and tone as needed.
- Compare against the original - if the repair sounds worse than the crackle, the clipping was too severe and the part needs re-recording.
Prevention: leave headroom
Clipping is entirely avoidable. Set your input so the loudest moments peak around -12 to -6 dBFS, leaving plenty of headroom above for surprises. Digital recording has enormous dynamic range, so there is no benefit to tracking hot - a quieter, clean take always beats a loud, clipped one. Watch your meters during the loudest part of the performance, not the quiet start, and give yourself room. If clipping is one of several issues, fix it first, then continue with the wider workflow in how to fix a bad vocal recording.
Clean it up free. Run your recording through Sauce Audio Repair to knock down noise, hum, clicks and clipping in one pass.