> Look at an audio file's waveform before playing it at max volume.
This is important, but more broadly, practice good sound hygiene: wear headphones them around your neck until you know for a fact that it's safe to put them on your ears. Additionally, never play "new" sounds without remembering to set audio output to a tiny fraction of normal and increasing it after the sample is deemed safe.
Musicians have this drilled into them because it involves their daily work, but this is good advice for everyone. Damage to ear drums can be permanent.
Also: put a limiter on your audio bus if you're exposed to such risks regularly. Don't play sounds directly, but open them from a host program that can apply VST/AU/... effects, and make sure there's a (brick-wall) limiter at the end.
And if you have been exposed to a very loud noise, to the point where your ears are ringing (probably not from headphones, but like starting a loud bike in a garage or gun fire), go to hospital, as soon as possible. They can give you medicaments and prevent permanent damage (tinnitus).
I have tinnitus. You don't want tinnitus. Silence is no longer a possibility for me. I got it messing about on computers and with loud cars in my teens, so unfortunately it was just a dumb kid thing that will last a lifetime.
I hate to guess how many kids are giving themselves tinnitus right now. It's just not possible to communicate the seriousness of long term problems to kids, they have no context for what long term really means yet.
Sorry to hear that, but I appreciate your words of warning. I go to loud clubs / live music a lot (pre covid) and despite knowing I should probably wear earplugs, I don't. Perhaps club revival post-lockdown is the time for me to begin.
In a pinch, you can use rolled / crumbled scraps of paper towels from the bathroom. It's quite common here (Berlin) and absolutely no one looks at you strangely if you do that. Some good clubs only have the bass really loud but it's not as common as it should be. High frequencies are what causes ear damage.
They are pricey, but such a good investment. Way better than anything else I've tried, more comfortable for extended periods of use and most importantly they attenuate the sound fairly evenly across the spectrum.
My only advice is to get the string attachment option, so that you can't accidentally lose one of them!
I just got myself a pair of custom earplugs from https://1of1custom.com/ which are absolutely amazing.
I ride a motorcycle and needed something to make sure I don't lose my hearing from the wind noise/exhaust noise (it's stock, but still 85 dB when the throttle is open).
They are also great for concerts and live music events where the speakers are generally cranked up to 90 - 95 dB.
I got the 27 dB version, and it allows me to hear what people are saying above the the music but really cuts out the painful parts.
They are not cheap, but I already have tinnitus, so I want to make sure it doesn't get worse.
Totally worth getting some nice-ish earplugs IMO. Even just getting a $30 set is such a wild improvement, comfort-wise, over those horrid foam earplugs you see a lot of people use.
This was a practice I had to adopt for a period of time where connecting my Sony bluetooth headphones to my iPhone would reset the system volume to max, sometimes only after I had pressed play on Spotify. Numerous occasions where my ears were instantly blasted with whatever music I had last paused at maximum volume trained the habit.
It was finally fixed a couple updates ago, I think around when they introduced the health feature to track whether you've been listening to music too loudly. Go figure. It had been getting frustrating enough that I was ready to write a blogpost wondering how much cumulative hearing damage had occurred across the iPhone userbase as a result of that bug.
This is important, but more broadly, practice good sound hygiene: wear headphones them around your neck until you know for a fact that it's safe to put them on your ears. Additionally, never play "new" sounds without remembering to set audio output to a tiny fraction of normal and increasing it after the sample is deemed safe.
Musicians have this drilled into them because it involves their daily work, but this is good advice for everyone. Damage to ear drums can be permanent.