Zoom h4n clipping

[sonomoth]

Hi, I make music and am totally new to recording. I've been using a borrowed h4n for a while and despite trouble shooting by myself for a long time it's still clipping. I have it plugged into my laptop and record about a foot and 1/2 away (acoustic guitar + voice, not sure if that's relevant). Everything is set to 48000 hz and 16-bit. I try to keep the levels between -20 and -12.

It might be that I'm just getting too loud at certain points, but I'd like to rule anything else out/figure out how to stay at a good volume. Thanks in advance and sorry if I don't make sense.

edit: forgot to add, i'm using audacity

 

[keith.rogers]

First, you should be recording at 24-bit. That's going to give you a bigger dynamic range to work with.

If you're on Windows, make sure you have the Zoom ASIO driver (just from reading the H4n manual, not H4n Pro).

I'm not sure where the clipping is because you've not provided a link to a recording. What would be good would be to just record a simple track in Audacity, export it without any normalization to a WAV file, then post a link where we can download it. Because you're new, the site won't let you post an entire link, but you can enter everything after the domain, e.g., leave off dropbox.com, soundcloud.com, whatever, and just give the parts after that, but tell us what domain is hosting it. (If you use SoundCloud, you must enable downloads for the track, otherwise all we hear is their 128k streamed version.)

If you're clipping on input to Audacity, you should turn down the level/gain for the mic(s) on the H4n.

You can also enable limiting in the track for recording, and I believe that effect will apply when used as an interface. But really, you usually should be able to record without clipping.