We may not need another test if that one was clean.
Can you hear the mosquito whine sound? Here it is following my voice.
http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/clips/USBMicrophoneWhineClip.mp3
Turn up the volume a bit when I stop talking. That’s the same whine sound you have and from the same microphone. The plain Blue Yeti microphone occasionally doesn’t like some computer’s USB connection. Once you have that whine sound, you can change it sometimes, but the combination is usually permanent. We went around the barn for months when this problem started to arrive on the forum. “Try a blue USB cable and stand on your left foot.”
No dice. Once you have this noise, it’s forever with that computer.
But it’s not deadly. The heavy designers ripped the noise apart, inspected it and designed a filter to delete the worst of it. That’s what Mosquito-Killer4 is. It’s a formal filter that anyone can apply as needed.
Please be clear we are also deleting tiny portions of your voice. This is not a completely free get out of jail card. But compared to the noise, anything is better.
I tried as much as possible to engineer a straight-line pathway for mastering. Do this and then do that. Noise is a problem and that’s why it’s a separate paper.
Let’s see if you can get the same results I did.
In your case, open that clip. Select the whole thing by clicking just above MUTE (this should track with the instruction in the paper). Effect > Mosquito-Killer4: 8 > OK.
If you play the clip, the annoying whine sound should be gone, or it was when I did it.
Now you go back to the top of AudioBook Mastering and start down the path. Equalization: Low Rolloff, 5000 Length > OK.
Etc. That’s exactly how I did it.
But.
You also have machine, fan, ventilation or some kind of additional room noise in the performance. So when I got to the end of the corrections, it was still too noisy. Back to the noise document and use Effect > Noise Reduction: 9, 6, 6 > OK. Let me know if you have trouble following these shortcuts.
Now I used Analyze > ACX Check and it passed—but not by a whole lot.
Technically, you could present a book like this and go with it (add the DeEsser to tame the harshness), but that’s a lot of work at each and every chapter. ACX stresses the chapters need to match, so there is no changing the protocol half-way through.
And this is where it gets sticky. You can’t tame the room or fan noises—or even hear them—without getting rid of the whine sound first. So this will be a juggling act.
I’m staring into the middle-distance trying to think of a good, graceful way to do this.
As we go.
Koz