Stereo Tool

Yes, from the title of this post, you can see I am a bit of a noob here, but a fledgling audiophile none the less..

I recently installed Winamp and Audacity in hopes to debrick alot of my music I've ripped from CDs. The files happen to be in AIFF.
I have seen various posts on the net about this process including one on this very forum, but I have yet to really get a clear answer or directions on how to accomplish this task.

I have Perfect Declipper VST 2.0. (unregistered) installed in my Winamp and the counterpart plugin in Audacity. The ladder of which I truly am lost.
In Winamp I'm managing to play the tracks declipped even with a preset I discovered on the net. The Problem is now saving said tracks to be permanently declipped.

I've read that this process is more doable in Audacity, but I can't even seem to properly load the plugin there. I've looked into exporting/saving etc... but nothing...

Any advice would be EXTREMELY helpful.
I very much NEED to have my CDS declipped, that way I can store them in portable devices such as my iPod Classic in my car, and not just be limited to playing them within Winamp.

In Winamp - choose dsp plugin (declipper vst). I assume you're using vst wrapper, right? And in the output section use something called "disk writer" instead of regular output, like direct sound. Of course you need to configure disk writer first so that you know where the files are saved.

Actually that process is not that simple.
First of all for some tracks you need to have big headroom for declipping. Sometimes 6, 8, and evem more dB. So you need to set Pre-Amp in ST at maximum -6dB, i would go to -10.
However You dont know is it track clipped around 0dB or around -6dB, so you need some "normalizing" after that.
Normalizing is kinda not ideal, it will just maximize whole track to loudest peek and that's it. But it's something.
Also using Winamp + ST + diskwriter will wrongly cut some tracks!

I would recommend dBoweramp, where you can set list of tasks to be done. Like cut silence(s) delcipping and normalizing.. or whatever you need to be done.

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In Audacity you need to make it scan for VST plugins on startup (look under Edit -> Preferences -> Effects). It will look in some default directory (not sure which one, you can look that up on Google). Then after restarting the plugin should appear under Effects. I have never tested this though.

In Winamp, instead of making things difficult with normalizing, just clip the audio afterwards and give it 6 dB of headroom. The presets that are build into the Perfect Declipper plugin all do this. The place where a song ends and the next one starts will be moved, so you might hear a bit of the end of the previously processed track at the start of the next one.