I updated the Audacity notes.
http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/audacity.html
The mastering page is the whole thing.
http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/ACXMastering/ACXMastering.html
I don’t think compressor is mentioned at all in there.
Many of the older tools and fancy applications went away when SetRMS was written. We always had to get the proper voice volume by working around the barn with the other tools and sometimes multiple passes. Now, it’s all in one step. Well, two, actually. SetRMS will shove your loudness around so the AudioBook loudness specification is met. This is very likely to leave some of your expressive peaks and vocal ticks too loud for either audiobook or even distortion specifications (clipping). While the show is inside Audacity, it’s not subject to clipping, so run Effect > Limiter at those settings to bring everything into compliance.
Please note nowhere is noise mentioned. This whole dance only works if you have a reasonably quiet studio and microphone. If you don’t, then we just left simple processing and mastering in the dust.
And just to make this as complicated as possible, if you’re reading for broadcast, then it’s up to you to meet their sound file specifications. ACX AudioBook just happens to be a convenient, well-documented standard. I can’t believe anybody would turn that down, but it’s not up to me.
There was a poster who was preparing a broadcast radio show from home in Maine. His delivery was finished MP3 played in one of their studios. He was cutting the show at home with MP3 music and after broadcast, the station tried to make an MP3 podcast. Too many MP3s. The podcast turned to audio garbage. We told him they had to let him deliver in something higher quality.
That’s the kind of wacky problems you can have when working from home.
I was the audio dude for a broadcast radio program partially shot in Los Angeles. They provided me with a list of requirements and I went down the list and satisfied them all. Since I was recording in a soundproof conference room, our segment went straight to air with no corrections.
Koz