1. A method for manipulating a digital audio signal comprising: separating the audio signal into a plurality of sub-band signals, wherein the sub-band signals comprise high frequency sub-band signals, medium frequency sub-band signals and low frequency sub-band signals; segmenting at least one of the sub-band signals into a plurality of events; assigning a haptic effect to at least one of the events to produce a haptic event to be output by an actuator; optimizing the high frequency sub-band signals by adjusting one or more clipping parameters based on an amount of aliasing; performing a spectral decomposition analysis and a power spectrum computation of the low frequency sub-band signals; generating one or more candidate haptic events from each of the sub-band signals; and prioritizing a candidate haptic event based on a sub-band of frequencies when two or more candidate haptic events from different sub-bands are detected to overlap one another, wherein the prioritized candidate haptic event is output by the actuator.