Re: How to keep sox_ng from clipping on an F32 .wav file from a Zoom recorder

On 7/5/26 10:19 PM, Doug Lee wrote:
> I recorded part of a Virginia/DC air show last night with a Zoom H1
> Essential recorder, which uses 32-bit float samples. Try as I might, I
> can't keep sox_ng from clipping while trying to process these files. Is
> this possible currently?

It may be that it's saving samples whose value is >1.0 (or <-1.0) and 
the SoX WAV reader converts them to 32-bit linear from the range -1 to 
+1, clipping out-of-range ones before any other effects can be applied.

If that's the case, then no. To see if it is, you could find some wave 
editor that works internally in floats, such as rezound, and have a 
look, then preprocess them with some other tool that works internally in 
floats to reduce the volume into the range -1 to +1.
I dunno if ffmpeg handles out-of-range floats; another option may be

    sndfile-convert -normalize in.wav out.wav

For SoX to help, it would need a new option --float-mul=0.5 or something 
that reaches down into the low-level float reader and scales samples 
before conversion.

Sorry!

     M