A DJ mix recorded with the mixer in the red has a particular sound: the kicks are harsh, the loud sections fizz, and nothing you do in mastering seems to clean it up. That is clipping, and it is one of the most common faults in the mixes DJs upload to us. This guide covers what clipping actually does to a recording, how to tell whether yours has it, what can be repaired, what is gone for good, and how to stop it happening on the next set.
The short answer in 30 seconds
Clipping happens when the signal going into a mixer, recorder or audio interface is louder than it can hold. Everything above the ceiling is cut flat. Ordinary mastering cannot undo it, because by the time the file reaches a mastering chain the original peaks are already gone. What can be done is a repair: find each flat-topped peak, rebuild its shape from the audio either side of it, and hold the result below clipping. SetMaster Pro does this with the Repair clipped recording switch on the upload page. A lightly clipped set comes back clean; a heavily clipped one comes back better. Stretches clipped for longer than 20 ms are left as they are, because there is nothing left to rebuild from.
What clipping does to a recording
Every digital recorder has a hard ceiling: the loudest sample it can store. Push a signal past it and the recorder does not get louder, it just writes the ceiling value over and over until the signal drops back underneath. On a waveform, that shows as peaks with the tops sliced off flat.
A flat top is the problem, not the loudness. A clean kick drum peak is a rounded shape. A flat-topped one is, for those few milliseconds, a square wave, and a square wave is made of the fundamental plus every odd harmonic above it, all the way up. That stack of harmonics is the harsh, fizzy edge you hear on a clipped recording. It sits on top of every loud hit, it is worst on the kick and the snare, and it gets more obvious the louder the set is played back.
This is why a clipped mix can sound acceptable in the car and awful on a club system or a good pair of headphones. The distortion was always there; the louder playback just makes it easier to hear.
How it happens on a DJ recording
Three places, in roughly the order we see them:
The mixer's master output. The channel meters look fine, the master meter is kissing red on the drops, and the recording comes off the record output or the USB feed already clipped. Most club mixers clip harder and earlier than their meters suggest, and a meter that peaks in the top segment on every kick is a recording that is clipping on every kick.
The recorder's input gain. A hardware recorder, a phone, or a laptop interface has its own input stage with its own level. The mixer can be clean and the recorder can still be in the red, and the recorder's clip indicator is usually a small light you are not looking at while you play.
Software record levels. Recording from DJ software, or from a USB mixer into a DAW, there is a record level in the software too. Set to unity and left there, it is fine. Nudged up because the last recording sounded quiet, it clips.
None of these show up until you listen back, which is usually after the set, when the chance to turn something down has passed.
How to tell whether your recording is clipped
Four signs, from the quickest to the most certain:
You saw red. If the master meter or the recorder's clip light was lit on the loud parts, assume the recording is clipped there.
Listen to the loudest drop on headphones. Clipping sounds like a fizz or crackle riding on top of the kick and snare, present only on the loud hits and absent in the quieter passages. Distortion that is there all the time is something else.
Look at the waveform. Open the file in any editor and zoom in on a loud section. Clipped peaks have flat tops that line up exactly with the top and bottom edges. Clean peaks are rounded and reach different heights.
Run the free analysis. Our free DJ mix analysis reads the whole file and reports its peak level. A recording whose peaks sit hard against 0 dBFS for the whole set has almost certainly been clipped somewhere along the chain.
Why ordinary mastering does not fix it
A mastering chain works on the signal it is given. A limiter at the end of that chain holds peaks under a ceiling, and a flat-topped peak is already under the ceiling, so the limiter leaves it alone. EQ can soften the harshness a little by taking out some of the top end, but the harmonics run right through the midrange where the music lives, so you lose brightness from the whole mix to hide a fault that is only on the hits. Compression makes it worse, because it brings the quieter audio up towards the flat tops and makes them a bigger share of what you hear.
What a clipped recording needs is a step before mastering that deals with the flat tops themselves. That is what the repair does.
What Repair clipped recording does
The switch runs before the mastering profile you chose. It scans the whole recording for runs of samples sitting at the ceiling, and for each one it rebuilds the peak from the shape of the waveform either side of it. The waveform going into a peak and coming out of it says a great deal about what the top must have looked like, and a smooth curve fitted through that context is a far better estimate than a flat line. The rebuilt peaks naturally go above the ceiling, so the whole recording is then brought down by one fixed amount so that the tallest rebuilt peak sits just under it. Only then does the mastering profile run, on a file that is no longer clipped.
The result card tells you what it found, for example “Repaired 312 clipped regions”. If it finds nothing, it says nothing and the master is exactly what you would have got with the switch off.
It is worth being plain about what this is and is not:
It is a repair, not a recovery. The samples that were clipped are gone. The switch estimates what they must have been from the audio around them. On a lightly clipped set, where each clipped run is a millisecond or two on the loudest hits, that estimate is close enough that the harshness disappears and the set comes back clean. On a heavily clipped set it comes back better, and you should expect better rather than clean.
Runs longer than 20 ms are left alone. At that length there is no usable context either side to rebuild from, and a curve fitted across it would invent a shape rather than restore one. A recording that sat in the red for whole bars at a time is not rescued.
It is not a limiter and it does not change loudness. Loudness is set afterwards by the mastering profile, exactly as it is for any other upload.
Repair clipped recording is on the Studio Lite and Studio plans. It is off by default; switch it on when you know or suspect the recording went into the red, and leave it off for a clean one.
What cannot be fixed
Some things that sound like clipping are not, or are clipping that no repair will reach:
Clipped for seconds at a time. Long flat runs are skipped, as above. If the master meter was pinned for the whole drop, the drop stays as it is.
Distortion from a plugin or an effect. A soft clipper, a saturator or an overdriven filter on the mixer shapes the waveform rather than slicing it flat, so there is nothing flat-topped to find. That character is in the performance now.
Clipping inside the tracks you played. Some releases are clipped before they ever reach a DJ. The repair looks at the recording as a whole, and a track that was already flat-topped when you played it is treated the same way as one that was clipped in your recording. It may help; it may not.
MP3 artefacts. A low-bitrate source has a swirly, watery distortion on cymbals and hi-hats. That is encoding loss, not clipping, and nothing rebuilds it.
Stopping it next time
Prevention is one habit: leave headroom at every stage. Three rules cover it.
Keep the mixer's master out of the red on the loudest drop. Set the master so the loudest moment of the set peaks a couple of segments below the top of the meter. The recording will be quieter than you are used to. That is fine; mastering brings it up afterwards, cleanly.
Set the recorder's input so its peaks land around -6 dB, not 0. Play the loudest section you expect, watch the recorder's meter rather than the mixer's, and set the input level so it never reaches the top. A recording that peaks at -6 dB has lost nothing; a recording that peaks at 0 dB has almost certainly lost something.
Do not turn anything up because the last recording was quiet. A quiet recording is a mastering problem and takes two minutes to fix. A clipped one is a repair at best.
If you want the fuller picture on levels, what LUFS means for a DJ mix explains why a quiet, clean recording is the right starting point, and which mastering profile to use covers what happens to the level afterwards.
Three more repairs on the same page
Repair clipped recording sits under Audio Cleanup on the upload page alongside three other optional controls. All are off by default, and with everything off your master comes out exactly as it did before they were added.
Vinyl cleanup. For a set recorded from turntables. It takes out mains hum (50 or 60 Hz and its harmonics) when the hum is clearly there, and repairs surface clicks by rebuilding the audio either side of each one. It works on clicks shorter than 3 ms; deep scratches and skips are left as they are. Pro and above, with a High click setting on Studio Lite and Studio that looks for smaller clicks.
Multi-mix upload. Click Add more mixes under the drop zone, set the profile, format and destinations once, give each mix its own title, and click once. Close the page when the uploads finish; an email arrives as each master is ready. Studio Lite takes up to 5 mixes at a time, Studio up to your remaining monthly allowance.
Remove rumble and DC offset. Strips the sub-audible rumble and offset that turntables, hi-fi line-ins and older recorders leave behind, before mastering starts. On a clean digital mix it changes nothing. Pro and above.
Frequently asked questions
Can a clipped DJ mix be fixed? Partly. The samples that were clipped are gone, but a repair can rebuild each flat-topped peak from the audio either side of it and hold the result below clipping, which removes the harsh edge on a lightly clipped recording. A heavily clipped one comes back better, not clean, and stretches clipped for longer than 20 ms are left as they are.
Why does my DJ mix sound harsh and fizzy on the loud parts? That is almost always clipping. A peak that went over the recorder's ceiling is cut flat, and a flat top is a square wave made of odd harmonics that sit on top of every loud hit. It is worst on kick and snare and gets more obvious the louder the set is played back.
Does mastering remove clipping? No. A limiter holds peaks under a ceiling, and a clipped peak is already under it, so the limiter leaves it alone. EQ can hide some of the harshness at the cost of brightness across the whole mix. Clipping needs a repair step that runs before mastering and deals with the flat tops themselves.
How do I stop my DJ mix clipping when I record it? Leave headroom at every stage. Keep the mixer's master out of the red on the loudest drop, set the recorder's input so its peaks land around -6 dB rather than 0, and never turn a level up because the last recording sounded quiet. A quiet recording is fixed in mastering; a clipped one is a repair at best.
Which SetMaster Pro plans include clipping repair? Repair clipped recording is on Studio Lite and Studio. It is an optional switch on the upload page, off by default, and the result card reports how many clipped regions it repaired.