I like the publication, but it does suffer from off-board instructions and tutorials (such as mine). It’s out of date, seriously so in the case of Noise Removal which doesn’t exist any more in favor of Noise Reduction. Too many people were expecting Noise Removal to, you know, remove noise, which it rarely did. Oddly, Noise Reduction is much better at reducing noise sometimes close to zero than Noise Removal ever was. The reduction algorithm and the control panel changed.
They took the effect, burned it off, hosed it down and started over, successfully.
You also run into a problem I identified with my efforts to get people through ACX Compliance. Each post is different. Some are similar in a grand-overarching way, but the quality of the room, the quality of the voice and microphone problems are all over the map, so there is no “take this pill and everything will be better.”
You also can’t use a standard toolbox in the assumption that some performers will be paying attention and are spit and a penny away from announcing straight into ACX compliance with nearly no help at all.
“Oh, Cool. I made your voice very slightly denser with gentle compression [posted settings] and readjusted overall volume slightly to pass the ACX peak test [posted settings] and we’re out the door. How did you get your background so quiet? That kills most performers.”
There is one problem with your tutorial. It’s long. 12 screen scroll pages, and that’s only for Compression and Noise Removal. Nobody wants to be an audio engineer to do all this stuff and cranking through all those instructions is stiff. Particularly for the pick-up-a-cellphone-and-talk crowd.
I’m more than ever convinced you should record spoken works but leave the computer at home in the cupboard. A lot of our recovery and repair questions are about overcoming computer problems.
For standardized help, I will admit to using standard templates that I cut and paste into replies.
Audio Compressor
– Select the whole clip or show by clicking just above MUTE.
– Effect > Normalize: [X]Remove DC, [X]Normalize to -3.2 > OK
– Effect > Compressor: Thresh -20, Floor -50, Ratio 2:1, Attack 0.2, Release 1.0, > OK
– Effect > Normalize: [X]Remove DC, [X]Normalize to -3.2 > OK
I really got tired of writing that out each time.
Over weeks, I found that if you use that technique, which seems insane, adjusting compression is reduced to changing the Ratio number. You don’t change anything else. All the rest of the numbers in that list are the same pass after pass.
There are other tricks. Steve wrote a custom voice filter that eliminates rumble and low pitch sound problems. One swoop and many rumble noise problems vanish. Poop. Gone.
Etc.
But even with all that, sometimes getting someone to AudioBook heaven can take forum chapter after forum chapter.
The longest message thread on the forum is Ian who wanted to record audiobooks from his apartment in Hollywood. 39 forum chapters and over a year. It did work. He’s a published reader.
And all of this is assuming the performance can be fixed. Some can’t. Another copy and paste:
The Four Horsemen of Audio Recording (reliable, time-tested ways to kill your show)
– 1. Echoes and room reverberation (Don’t record the show in your mum’s kitchen.)
– 2. Overload and Clipping (Sound that’s recorded too loud is permanently trashed.)
– 3. Compression Damage (Never do production in MP3.)
– 4. Background Sound (Don’t leave the TV on in the next room.)
Koz