v3.1.0 — Noise suppression, hear yourself, a screen that is off at boot

Your microphone gets noise suppression and a way to hear yourself, and a recorder started with its
screen switched off now waits for it instead of quietly giving up.

Noise suppression

Settings → Instant replay → Suppress background noise runs your voice through RNNoise, a small
neural network that tells speech apart from fans, keyboards and the hum of a room, and turns the
rest down. It only touches the microphone — game audio never goes near it — and it cleans your
voice before the boost, so turning the boost up lifts you rather than the room.

It costs about 0.3% of one CPU core. The network holds your voice back by 10 ms; the recorder puts
that back, so your voice still lines up with the picture. Switching it on or off, or moving the
slider, applies straight away and keeps what is already buffered.

One slider, two halves. Up to 40% it mixes a little of the untouched microphone back in: the
most natural-sounding end, with noise brought down by the number on the slider in dB. Past 40% the
network runs in full and a gate closes whenever it is not sure you are talking — that is what
catches hiss and keyboards, which the network on its own lets straight through. Each step up closes
the gate deeper and asks for more certainty before it opens.

Measured on test signals, how far each kind of noise comes down:

	20%	40%	60%	80%	100%
Fan, room	−20 dB	−47 dB	−66 dB	−122 dB	−122 dB
Hiss	−9 dB	−10 dB	−10 dB	−23 dB	−69 dB
Keyboard	−7 dB	−8 dB	−28 dB	−48 dB	−68 dB

Your voice loses at most about 1 dB at any setting. At the very top, very quiet words can get
clipped — which is what the next part is for.

It needs your output device at 48 kHz, which almost every one already is. If yours is not, the
panel says so under the slider rather than suppressing at the wrong pitch.

Hear yourself

A Test button under the microphone settings. Click it, say something, click again, and it
plays back what you said — with the boost and suppression exactly as they are set now, through
the same code a saved clip goes through. So what you hear is what a clip of you will sound like.
Change a setting and test again to compare. It works while the buffer is running and does not
disturb it.

A screen that is off at startup

If you record your main screen but it is switched off when your PC boots — and Clipper starts with
Windows — the recorder used to exit on the spot. The panel went on saying "Starting…" forever, and
turning the screen on changed nothing until you switched instant replay off and on again.

It now waits for that screen, exactly as it already did when a screen went away mid-session, and
starts recording the moment it comes on. The Screen dropdown lists a missing screen as
"not connected" instead of quietly showing a different one as selected, and it refreshes when
screens come and go. And if the recorder ever does stop without being asked, the panel says so.

Smaller things

• Clip cards and the trim window no longer show the filename; a card is its picture and one row of
  details. Hover a card, or the trim window's Show in Explorer, to see the name.
• Setting titles are brighter, so they stand out from the explanation under each one.

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Clipper Setup 3.1.0.exe installs for the current user; Clipper 3.1.0.exe is a portable single
file.