Clipping and Compression
Pico,
I thought maybe you might be interested in
seeing what I heared when I listened to your first clip. I'm not attacking your work or your recording, but instead trying to help, so please take it as such.
Look very carefully at this picture:
The top pair of sinewaves (white background) is your first mp3, imported "as is". Right at the left edge of the audio window your track swoops down from about zero, almost to the bottom of the window's edge but not quite (no clip), then swoops up across zero, and hits the top of the window (clipping), goes horizontal a short distance, then swoops down, and repeats, with a smaller little bang off the upper window again towards the right (clipping).
Looking at your mp3 recording end to end, I observed several things. First, the left channel (upper half of the white audio area) clips more often than the right channel (bottom half of the white audio area). I also noticed both channels only clip on the positive side of the waveform, not the negative, and this is true for both left and right channels.
Now lets look at your recording again, but instead of looking at the squared parts, look at the overall waveform. You can clearly see a larger sine-wave shaped thing, with smaller waveforms all across it. Look at the smaller waveforms, you'll notice they have a certain amount of "swing" to them. The distance top to bottom of the smaller waveforms, is the amount of headroom you're using at that instant in the recording.
If you look at the bottom track (black background), thats my recording you listened to the other day. Same type of thing, larger waveforms with smaller waveforms all over it. But what you might notice is that the smaller waveforms spread all over, are much smaller in the vertical than yours. *This* is what compression looks like.
Hope that helps...
