Noise Floor, and background music

Hi everyone, I am new to posting and I would like to thank all who created this great forum and those who help us newbies. My question, and I hope this hasn’t been posted already,I added music to a voiceover-nice and light in the background-but then I couldn’t get past the Noise Floor check in ACX specs. Is this an issue or can I just skip over the ACX Noise Floor when there is music in the background?

Could you pass noise before you dumped the music in there?

That’s worth a post to ACX. I don’t know and I’ve never seen instructions about that. My obsessive side is telling me you are creating a theatrical presentation, not an AudioBook.

My suspicious side is screaming you are doing that because your plain voice can’t make noise specification. Did I hit it?

Koz

No… that’s not the case. The author thought it would be nice touch for intro music behind the introduction. She’s --heard it on other Audio Books. Anyway, we are ready to upload our audio book tomorrow with out the music files. All is well with our Audio book files, I double checked using the ACX Check plug-in on Audacity ,original .wav files and again on the Mp3 files. I am using NT-1a mic in a soundbooth to a Mixer, a 802VLZ4, then into a Zoom5.This setup gives me an extra sound file in case my computer up and dies on me…AGAIN. Shannon records the dialogue twice each session so I have an extra track in Sony Acid, then after the tracks are cut I shuffle into RX5 for clean up, then to Soundforge for a little comp, limit , then into Audacity for the check up. Sure love that RX5.

The author thought it would be nice touch for intro music behind the introduction.

Right. So the actual performance passes ACX-Check. You made it sound like you have background music through the whole story. No, that will not pass ACX-Check and may actually violate ACX rules. I’m waiting for ACX comments.

Koz

I am a grand believer in double recording important performances. It doesn’t take many tense chats with the Producer to convince you what a bad idea it is to show up with no work.

Koz

Thanks for the replies. Uploaded our first project today.

Hey everyone our book came up today. so we passed everything first time. WOW! that was a 4 month learning curve.

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that was a 4 month learning curve.

Wasn’t that fun? You can do this with more abbreviated techniques, but you need the experience to tell you what parts you can leave out and which ones you need.

I have a soundproofed third bedroom from an early kid that played drums. I’m going to buy that kid a Coke or something. I can produce an audiobook-like performance with minimal equipment. This was the most fun.

I lost interest at the prospect of taking out my habitual mouth ticks, but everything else passes ACX.

I almost got a test clip to work by recording directly into my Mac laptop, but I couldn’t get the quality up to snuff. Very nearly a working sound clip with no microphone.

Koz

If you do change techniques, ACX is keen on having all your chapters match. So don’t change anything in the middle of a book.

Koz

We’ve already begun recording our next book, should be much more fun this time around. I hate myself when I get optimistic

I hate myself when I get optimistic

Beware of things that change by themselves. Do you use the computer for anything else, particularly anything with its own sound services? Skype does not Play Well With Others to borrow a report-card phrase.

Do you let the computer do automatic updates? How full is the hard drive? That last one regularly burns the video people.

“I’ve been cranking out long form videos for a month and now, suddenly, for no reason, and out of the blue, with absolutely no warning, the computer is going wacko.”

Hows 'bout we take about 200GB of video production off the machine, optimize the drive and try it again?

Koz

I back up every session. My hard drives are 3/4 full…, there abouts. We record to Zoom H-5 at 24 bits .wav via a mixer… pretty much every early morn- when it s very quiet. Guess what we get in the early Friday mornings?..planes, and lots of them. Never noticed that before. She logs each part or paragraph as a p-# so I can copy the files from zoom using the log book is a guide. During her recording sessions she records the same part/paragraph several times. She scratches the flubs and makes new tracks. Gives her a chance to relax catch her breath etc. She circles the tracks she fells are the good ones, this way when I pull up the tracks in Sony Acid I know which track to start with and I layer the other tracks under the good track so if the good track has a minor flub on a word, I can take a better section from the tracks beneath and delete the bad section and paste in the better piece etc. For Instance Chapter 1 file would contain Chapter 1 Header, Chapter 1 P-1, Chapter 1 P-2 etc. Chapter 1 P-1 could have as little as 2 tracks or 5-7 tracks with some flub tracks in the folder that were scratched. That’s a bit on how we are doing it so far in our new Audio Book adventure.