With loudness levelling enabled, EQ disabled, preamp set to default +4dB and limiter enabled, I am experiencing clipping on all platforms I have access to (Android, Linux, Windows & Headless). It appears to me as though the limiter is doing little to nothing. Disabling the limiter and setting the preamp to 0dB has been my solution & I’m happy at that. Just thought I’d point it out…
A track which clearly clips with default settings: Into The Fall by Jain on TIDAL
Hmm, when I look at the logs, I see:
/home/pi/.cache/Plexamp/log/Plexamp.log:Dec 27, 2022 09:17:40.088 [0xa5a7d140] INFO - BASS: Queueing stream (1 total, 3 handles) with identifier 63ab44d3f1d14d5e60d27307, gain -0.9 dB, overlap duration 0 ms, start offset 0 ms (paused: 0).
That should imply a total gain of -18 dB (reference level) + 4 dB (preamp) - 0.9 dB (loudness leveling). That will not clip (and I don’t hear it clipping.
Perhaps your logs show something else?
Plexamp.log (282.6 KB)
Thanks for looking into this Elan, much appreciated.
There’s a lot of stuff written to those logs, so I’ve uploaded it rather them pretending to know what’s going on… 
I started the session with my mitigated settings, changed to the defaults (+4db with limiter), changed tracks a couple of times before listening to Jain again & it clipped straight away. Hopefully you will find what you need near the end as I quit thereafter.
Perhaps line 1711?:
Dec 27, 2022 21:21:38.944 [0x605f7640] INFO - BASS: Opened stream 63ab61e2011c3fb8cdee0f2e in 0 ms (paused: 0) with gain 3.1 dB, max 0 Kbps (picked flac, 430 Kbps, actual 430 Kbps/sec).
Ah yes, I understand now what I got wrong. The gain (-0.9 dB) is given relative to the -18 dB reference gain, so you end up with -0.9 db + 4 db = +3.1 dB, which could indeed result in, well, undesirable behavior.
This is actually germane to something which was brought to my attention. We implemented loudness leveling based on the way TIDAL does it (which was based on some compelling research).
Note item 5:
To avoid clipping, only attenuate tracks, never apply positive gain. If the loudest track of an album is softer than target level, all tracks of the album will play soft.
So it seems like perhaps we should just be ensuring that we never add gain to a track, which would resolve the issue you’re seeing.
Glad you’re on it Elan. Also, glad you’re following Tidal - they have volume normalisation right to my ears at least. What I still find interesting is that the limiter doesn’t audibly affect playback in positive gain scenarios.
Agreed, though it might just be related to the configuration of the limiter (attack/decay times).
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