You have a GREAT VOICE!
I agree.
RMS Normalize plugin
That’s concerning. You need all the tools mounted and running to make this work. We reduced the mastering process to the simplest possible, but you can’t fudge anything any more or make it up as you go. You have to follow the recipe.
Do you have Windows set to show you filename extensions? Does the plugin show up as rms-normalize.ny or rms-normalize? Windows hiding filename extensions is handy until Something Goes Wrong.
This is where I’m going to get myself in hot water. I know next to nothing about the Windows service.
Does this help?
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/installing_effect_generator_and_analyzer_plug_ins_on_windows.html
I cheat a little and tell Audacity Add-Remove system to load everything.
Effect > Add/Remove Plugins > Show: All > Select: All > Enable > OK. You might try that if you have one that refuses to appear.
RMS Normalize is one of the key processes to making AudioBooks work. Without that, the process goes into several pages of detailed, painful instructions.
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Did you do that thing where you wave the microphone around to find the noise? Shotgunning this is nice, but as Mack Caster points out, once you get close to good noise level, it gets really hard to maker it better.
And there is one other thing that new performers users do which may not be helpful. Remember I said that we could get you into technical conformance with just the normal tools and a touch of Noise Reduction? If that result is a little too hissy for you, you can boost the Noise Reduction to 9, 6, 6 and reduce the noise a bit more. Listen for personal quality control and then submit a test for a reading. You can chase this forever and never quite get around to submitting work.
This is usually a guy thing. “Maybe if I moved the microphone just a little bit more and changed the color of the ink on my script.”
I hope nobody tells on me, but we had more than one reader posting they were prepared to patch and correct their readings word by word. How close are you to retirement? You’ll be doing this for years.
Koz