Help please. Cropping levels

Well, there are some things you can try, sure.  You should let us know what kind of tools you have.  What is your DAW platform, especially what editing tools you may have.  In MC5 you can pull up the recording even if it's a single audio track, and carefully Select  (Edit/ from now / till now being careful to just nudge the one tiny second you've got the worst noise...)  and then use  the Process Audio/Gain to try dropping the gain like -6db at a time, and see if that makes it accceptable.   I also use the free downloadable Audacity editor at times, which can often enlarge the area into a bigger space and allow you a more precise form of the same edit.   Beyond that, I don't know of anything more professional you can do if it's already mixed into one audio file.  You'd have to have it broke down into discreet tracks like a CW Project file, to do better.  Good luck, hope that helped! 

Beagle


if you've already recorded it with clipping above 0dB you can't fix it with real results that are acceptable.  using audacity the way JD mentions is doable, but IME it will not yield usable results unless the area you're changing is very small and not clipped very hard in the first place.

if it doesn't clip at 0 (just the peaks are touching 0, but not "flattened at 0dB) then you can just use a volume envelope to reduce the volume.

You're right Reece and I looked back at the OP again and saw that he's mentioned a 5 or 10-second timeframe and that's a LONG time in music editing terms!  Aside from the points of selecting and lowering gain, and a volume envelope, I can't see any really good solution.  But it can be improved with this type of editing, maybe to a passable level.