As its name suggests, this function allows you to collect various statistics on the selected sound. The various RMS Power values are calculated by computing the RMS power over intervals of length RMS window. The DC Offset value represents the average value of the waveform. It is usually desirable that this value is low. If it is larger than about 0:01 over an interval of more than one second, you may want to use the Suppress DC Offset function in the Effects > Denoising menu.
Clipped samples are samples that take the maximal
admissible value. The presence of clipping indicates that the volume
of the sound is too high. This usually results in a saturated
sound that is very unpleasant. Unfortunately, it is not possible to
significantly improve the quality of the sound once clipping has
occured. If you find that a recorded sound contains clipped samples,
it is advisable to perform the recording again with the input gain set
to a lower value.
The Average RMS power is a useful indication of how ‘loud’ a song sounds on average. If you have two songs with one of them showing an average RMS power of –20dB and the other one showing a value of –30dB, the second song will sound significantly quieter than the first one. In order to bring it to roughly the same level, you can amplify it by 10dB. See also Section 5.3.5 for some tips on how to normalize sounds to bring them approximately to the same level.
Hitting [command][C] while the waveform statistics are displayed copies them into the clipboard, so that they can be reused for example in a spreadsheet program like OpenOffice.
