How is an individual file that wants more than merely pure narration supposed to come in at 170 MB or under?
It doesn’t matter what the content is. I just created a one-hour mono show suitable for testing. I exported it at 192 quality MP3 and it gave me an 86MB sound file, generously under the 170MB limit. I’m also half-way to the other limit they post of not speaking over two hours.
a novel of mine … I’m trying to turn into an audiobook
I don’t think that’s correct. You’re trying to turn it into a theatrical radio drama. You all but said so. I’m surprised the company didn’t comment on the addition of music and sound effects. That’s normally not done.
It seems I am always either under -3 DB are over -3 DB RMS on portions of my tracks.
I think you’re misinterpreting the technical standards.
This is an English version of the three standards.
The first value, peak has an upper limit. Peaks may never, ever get louder than -3dB (70%), but they can be quite a bit lower than that without triggering an alarm.
RMS is a fancy-pants way of measuring loudness. That one does have two limits, an upper -18dB and a lower (-23dB).
It is possible and I have done this multiple times, to read passages into a microphone under good conditions, stop, gently adjust the overall volume, export an ACX compliant sound clip and break for lunch. So while admittedly difficult, this is not rocket surgery.
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I’m just now, after reading through that the fourth time, waking up to what’s happening. The ACX Robot knows the natural cadence and structure of the human presenter/announcer. I bet you’re driving it nuts with the special effects, production sounds and background music. Exactly the same thing happens when you try to put music into a conference voice system or record tunes with a default Windows sound system.
Since you’re recording on a Windows machine, it’s possible internal voice processing is causing some of your odd problems and wandering test values.
In my opinion you should create the full theatrical presentation and run it through a stiff, global compressor such as Chris’s Compressor add-on to even out the lumps and bumps, and post it yourself — or — read the plain, flat audiobook and submit that to ACX. I don’t think the full theatrical presentation will ever make it through ACX compliance.
Koz