I have been checking my audio setup for the last hour trying to figure out where the hell the distortion was coming from - clearly it was clipping digitally, but I had no idea where.
Finally I realized that it was Elisa. I must have accidentally increased the volume in the audio player, which was what was causing the distortion. The GUI indicates the volume at half the full volume!
This is a very bad way of handling volume in Elisa.
If the only thing you have is a volume bar, then 100% should correspond to 1.0 on the volume element or iface, but not more.
If you really do want people to be able to go higher than 1.0 (and thus risk introducing distortion), the volume bar should show this as going past some point of distortion (graying it out or whatever).
Even better would be for the volume bar to have a level indicator below it, that is live updated (much like flumotion has), so you actually see what the effect is of increasing the volume setting.
In elisa-plugins/
self.volume_max = 2.0
That will generate distortion for sure.
The question is: is there any good reason to set the maximum volume to more than 1.0 ?