"Shouldn't clip ever" is overly simplistic. If you're trying to get a track loud (making it sound drastically better in cars and on laptop speakers — a trade-of

"Shouldn't clip ever" is overly simplistic. If you're trying to get a track loud (making it sound drastically better in cars and on laptop speakers — a trade-off), you have to find a balance between distortion and compression. Badly done compression sounds way worse than a little clipping. Listen to Oasis's Definitely Maybe for an example of a CD that doesn't clip at all, but is virtually unlistenable because the dynamics were squashed out of it. Short lengths of clipping (just a few samples) or clipping on drums can't usually be heard. The one thing that will always start sounding bad right away is clipped vocals, but that doesn't usually happen on professional recordings. These people know what they're doing. If you open up all your favorite albums in a wave editor and rage everytime you see clipping, you'll be doing a lot of raging. But most of those sound engineers know their stuff and aren't being stupid. Worry about how it sounds, not how it looks.