E · AUDIO LOUDNESS
Audio clipping
What happens when your sound hits the digital ceiling.
By Thomas Linck, founder · Updated June 2026
Audio clipping happens when a signal tries to go past 0 dBFS, the hard ceiling of digital audio. The samples that do not fit are flattened, and the chopped-off peaks turn into crackle and fuzz on your loudest words. Once a recording clips hard, the distortion cannot be fully undone.
WHY IT MATTERS
Clipping lands on the moments you care about most — the laugh, the punchy word, the sentence where you finally get animated. Once a peak is chopped off, the original audio is gone, and no plugin fully brings it back. Prevention is cheap: record with peaks around −12 to −6 dBFS, then protect the master with a true-peak limiter at −1 dBTP.
TARGET · STANDARD
| Recording peaks | −12 to −6 dBFS | headroom for loud moments |
| Export ceiling | −1 dBTP | true-peak limiter on the master |
| Repair | partial at best | de-clip tools, then re-record |
How CutScore measures it
CutScore scans the entire track for clipped samples and true-peak overshoots, then flags every hit with a timestamp — so you know whether each clipped moment is a quick de-clip or an honest re-record before anyone else hears it.
QUESTIONS
Frequently asked.
A crackle, fuzz or harsh buzz that appears only on the loudest words and vanishes when things go quiet. On the waveform it shows up as flat tops where the peaks should be rounded.
Only partially. A de-clip tool can soften light clipping, but hard clipping deleted the original peaks, so no plugin can fully bring them back. The honest fix is to re-record the line with peaks around −12 to −6 dBFS.