Can anybody provide a link to a tutorial that will give someone a step-by-step creation of a complicated audiobook file?
I got six chapters into a novel of mine (published back in 1970 by McFadden in New York City) that I’m trying to turn into an audiobook that will provide more than just narration of a novel. Part of the problem with audiobooks has to do with the fact that novels, or books rather, of any kind were meant simply to be read and not listened to. A script, on the other hand, IS meant to be listened to and is written expressly to that purpose. I learned that much working as a voiceover artist on a number of Discovery channel television documentaries. I always marveled at what those broadcast engineers were able to do with not only my voice but all the music and sound effects that went with it. Those technicians were top-of-the-line and had to of had doctorates in that profession. If we are talking in just those terms, I would not of gotten out of elementary school.
I have six chapters (out of almost 30) done to perfection, complete with music and sound effects, character voices, etc., but all this requires a dozen or more audacity tracks to bring together. I have tried noise reduction to get rid of extraneous sounds because I cannot afford an expensive sound recording room that is free from all that. Instead I have rigged up a very small closet with egg crate type foam coating the inside of it which seems to give me an extremely claustrophobic environment where my A–21 audio technica microphone while sent to three quarters of the meter’s maximum range produces large green streaks on the recording meter when one is simply breathing inside that studio closet. My pop filter doesn’t help that. Although voice is picked up beautifully.
The ACX check robot seems to think I’m going about this all wrong, it passes some proportion of a five-minute tape and trashes others. It seems I am always either under -3 DB are over -3 DB RMS on portions of my tracks.
I find that applying any sort of “effects” such as reverb, amplification (plus or minus), change of pitch, anywhere within those dozen or more tracks will often cause Audacity to ignore the “mix and render to new track” command after all the tracks have been selected, and takes about two seconds to do what it calls a render and leaves me with nothing but a narration track. It didn’t used to do this before and I never had a problem with mix and render until I tried to go beyond the opening through chapter 6 (which has always worked beautifully) but it now refuses to mix chapters 7 and 8 which has its own project file.
I can’t seem to get my chapter lengths for sound much under a gigabyte of data. How is an individual file that wants more than merely pure narration supposed to come in at 170 MB or under? As I read the requirements for that from Audible’s list of them, the only workaround seems to be to turn one chapter into seven or eight or nine or ten mini-sections.
I am familiar enough now with Audacity to create the sound and the effects with music and narration to get what I want, but I doubt that I can ever get my files to where they will meet those very stringent requirements. If there is a workaround for this situation and anybody out there knows what it is (and can be made to work before the whole market for audiobooks simply collapses) please tell me…