Everybody wants to read for audiobooks, publish, make a fortune and retire to a tasteful cottage in Saint Tropez. I used to have a picture of that cottage and now I can’t find it.
But before you do all that, you have to record your voice and make it past the ACX Robot.
The ACX Robot checks for basic technical competence. RMS (loudness), peak volume (overload) and background noise. There’s a reason this is an automated step. Most people on home systems fail one or more of those measurements—usually noise.
I have a morbid joke that if you can tell your computer is on just by listening, you’re dead.
Anyway, over time we developed a suite of tools to process your voice to ACX compliance, a measurement tool to see how you did and a paper that tries to help with the inevitable bad noise results.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/audiobook-mastering-version-4/45908/1
This is not a bad process if you want to read for anything because everybody’s going to want level volume, good vocal quality and little or no audible background noise. It’s just ACX publishes specifications ahead of time and we wrote a tool to measure them and processing to actually get there.
We never established what you’re using for a microphone. How are you getting your voice into Audacity?
This is my home photo version of ACX’s illustration of a good vocal studio. Most Macs make little or no noise, so that setup is perfectly valid. If you have a good, noise-free room, it almost doesn’t make any difference what the microphone is. etc.
I can step through what everything is and why it’s there when you get that far.
Koz