Hi, i’m new to the audiobook industry and to audacity so please excuse any mistakes.
I was wondering how to add room tone into multiple clips (inbetween audio) at once.
The problem with my audio is thatiy is has this loud buzzing or humming noise consistently and the only way to edit it out is to use noise reduction on my whole audio track which then doesnt meet the acx standard.
A way that I found works was to take some room tone from the beginning or end and use noise reduction until the humming was gone. I would then punch copy and paste this reduced room tone into each and every gap in my audio which, as you might be able to tell, is very tedious.
If anyone has any other methods to help me out that would be great, thanks.
I probably don’t have to tell you to back-up before adding noise!
You can generate some “artificial” noise and you can be able to mix it in from beginning-to-end. Real world “room tone” exists throughout the whole recording.
I would try Brownian noise. It’s weighted toward the low frequency range (more-so than pink noise). That should make it measure relatively high while being less audible. Generate → Noise → Brownian
Go to Tracks → Add New and generate the noise into the new track. It will me mixed with your existing track.
An amplitude of 0.0005 is about -66dB. (1)
You should work on that… Maybe get some better equipment. Most people who don’t have a soundproof studio still need some noise reduction but it’s not good to start with a bad hum or buzz.
(1) That’s the peak amplitude and ACX might be checking the RMS noise which will read lower… It might not be “bad enough”.
The audio when the person was speaking in this video had even, low traffic noise but part of it had music from the parked truck in the background. I extracted the live audio andwas able to use the noise gate to remove all of it and then reintroduce the traffic noise from a clip I made when the music wasn’t playing. Then I reinserted the audio track into the video, Stopping and Restarting a Bicycle . There was a bit of wind noise I couldn’t remove, but good enough.
To add room tone between clips more efficiently in Audacity, create a clean room tone track and use Generate → Silence to mark gaps, then Paste your room tone over those silences. You can also use macros (Chains) or Nyquist plug-ins to automate the process. This avoids manual pasting and keeps your audio ACX-compliant.
ACX requires very-low background noise (-60dB or better).
But they’ll also reject you if the “room tone” is too quiet or for digital-dead-silence (“over processing”). …It IS possible to get -infinity dB in the digital domain. Nobody seems to know how quiet is “too quiet”. I know they’ll accept -70dB.
Well, this wasn’t an audiobook. The whole video was shot outdoors. The was cyclist gave an explanation with a visible outdoor background. and the background noise which I reinserted was consistent with the background noise as she spoke while riding her bicycle.
I could remove the wind noise by cloning her voice (lovo.ai) and reinserting a couple words, but – not worth the trouble!
You should work on that… Maybe get some better equipment. Most people who don’t have a soundproof studio still need some noise reduction but it’s not good to start with a bad hum or buzz.
