Find out whether a song or an episode clips, and where: every stretch of flat-topped, full-scale samples is listed with its time and marked in red on the waveform. Checked in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Measured entirely in your browser — your audio is never uploaded anywhere.
Your audio is decoded and measured entirely in your browser. It is never uploaded or stored by CAPTD and never leaves your device.
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Clean file ready? Spotlight writes the posts to promote it on every platform — and Episode mode makes clips and audiograms of podcasts.
Spotlight, CAPTD's workspace for promoting your work, is part of CAPTD's paid plans — see pricing.
Open SpotlightScans every sample of every channel for runs of 3 or more consecutive samples at or beyond full scale (within 0.01 dB of 0 dBFS) — the flat tops a clipped waveform has. Runs less than 50 ms apart are grouped into one stretch. It also measures the true peak (4x oversampled), which catches peaks between samples that encoding can turn into clipping.
A handful of single-sample hits isn't counted; three in a row is the usual definition of a clip. If there's no clipping but the true peak is above -1 dBTP, the file is likely to clip once it's encoded to MP3 or AAC.
Clipping happens when a signal is pushed past the largest value the file can store: the tops of the wave are cut flat. You hear it as crackle or harshness, often on loud drums, plosives or a shouted word.
Once clipped, the lost part of the wave can't be recovered by turning the file down. It has to be fixed in the recording, the mix or the export.
Clipping is easy to miss on laptop speakers and obvious on good headphones and car speakers. Distributors and podcast hosts won't stop a clipped file, but listeners notice.