I've got a strange issue that I hope somebody can help me troubleshoot. When I play back music with very high volume (e.g. peak level approximately 100%) in MC9, I get bad clipping. If I turn on Replay Gain and set it to a fixed -0.5 dB, the clipping goes away.
Background: all songs have zero replay gain and the replay gain plugin is disabled when the clipping occurs. I'm playing back WMA files--haven't confirmed whether it happens with MP3. I have tested to see if the same thing happens with Windows Media Player, and it doesn't. Exact same file, no clipping. Finally, the clipping goes away if I use DirectSound instead of Wave Out. How's that for weird.
I've tried pulling down the volume slider in my Volume Control app, but that just changes the output gain--in other words, the lower volume is applied after the clipping.
Can anybody help me troubleshoot this? The "fixed replay gain minus 0.5 dB" might be a workaround except that replay gain doesn't seem to apply to certain video files, so I get this same problem with very high-level video files.
Thanks for any tips.