Having switched from WL6 directly to WL8.5.2, noticed that the record window metering no longer indicates the number of “overs”, as in previous versions. This was a measurement our engineers came to rely on.
I am not finding a preference to turn this on/off, so has this feature been discarded or…?
I am afraid the the True Peak metering does not report the information we are interested in.
Under certain conditions, True Peak could predict >0dBFS even if the actual digital peak is not clipped.
True Peak metering only indicates the held, max “True Peak” value. WL6 and earlier indicated a running total number of overs.
True Peak is an interesting metric, but until prevailing commercial music levels drop 5dB (cough/wheeze) then True Peak is mostly irrelevant. The previous metering features were very helpful for our work.
Yes, that is the indication I am looking for. I am glad that it is still included.
For some reason, I cannot get that indicator to become visible here. I expanded the Record window to fill a 1024x768 monitor, but still no appearance. I also checked the main level meter, too (set to monitor input). Nothing there either. Both digital and true peak modes…
Yes, clipping: 32 consecutive samples pegged at 0dBFS, top and bottom. Global analysis detects them correctly.
Ah, then we are comparing apples and oranges. Here is my signal path:
Analog Signal → ADC → RME AES PCIe → ASIO → WL8 Record WIndow.
In your scenario, you are adding gain in the floating-point domain, therefore your will measure digital signal above 0dBFS. This is “over” but technically not clipping until exported back to a fixed-point format (I believe).
In my scenario there are no digital signals above 0dBFS, but the clipping is still real.
EDIT: Added some pics which show the captured, clipped waveform. As you can see, the samples clipped tally does not appear. When I turned the master section level up, then the tally did appear. So it seems this may only work during playback?
Right: 0dBFS, lots of consecutive 0’s in a row = clipping = flat top = distortion.
The old WL record window would keep a running tally of clips (like >2 consecutive samples @ 0dBFS). This was very helpful to know during and/or after a record pass.
I am unable to get this tally to appear in the WL8 record window, for an unknown reason.
With some more testing, I can reproduce what you describe. I remember now this is caused by a change that was introduced after WaveLab 6. In short, now WaveLab only detects real overs > 0 dB.
In WaveLab 6, WaveLab was detecting overs >= 0 dB.
Why this change? Because some peoples complained that 0 dB is not a real over (which is right).
But that also breaks your needs, which are legitimate.
The only way, will be to add an option in the level meter settings.