Are these crazy ideas for audiobook production?

Feedback and Discussion Forum Adding Features
, ,
1

I’m still in the learning and doing my homework phase of preparing to start creating audio books next year.

1/

One of the things I’m pondering is finding a way to have labelled sections of audio, which will have an effect applied. The purpose is to have some way to make a character’s thoughts audibly different to their spoken words. (Maybe by a subtle reverb or echo effect?) Likewise, how to make dialogue that’s been transmitted mentally, rather than spoken aloud, sound audibly different?

Anyway, does a way to apply effects to labelled sections sound sensible?

2/

A second idea was to have a (simple-markup) text track as another input, where the text is the narrated words in the audio. Obviously keeping that aligned during edits would be one of the difficult aspects of such a feature. (Simple markup would be e.g. to preserve italics, say, or bold.) This might have huge benefits, like the ability to generate a closed-caption file alongside the audio file.

3/

And a related idea would be the ability to select sections of audio by a selection operation on the corresponding section of text - with the possibility perhaps to then apply a label to the selected regions of audio; or to apply an effect to all those selected regions.

4/

Oh, another crazy idea: to have some pure tone generator I could use via a hand control to add a tone outside the audio range of the rest of the audio, purely as a marker for specific sections. The idea would only make sense if the tone could be used to mark sections of audio, and then for the tone to be removed. Is that even possible, or a super stupid idea?

2

If you are submitting your book to ACX or (other publisher) they have lots of requirements. I think I read that for ACX can’t be “dramatic production” like an old radio show with different actors for each character or music of sound effects, etc. But when searching today I only found something that says to use music and sound effects sparingly.

1 Like
3

That makes sense to use them sparingly. Interesting that they don’t want it to be too like a radio play. I suppose that makes sense too, as it starts to seem more like it’s not a book, but a recorded play. Again, that fits with the idea of sound effects (which are common in radio plays!)

4

To avoid copyright problems, they probably only want the voice they are paying for.

1 Like