Constant, very quiet clicking

[alkaline_ice]

Alright, it was receiving input. It’s rather far away from me at the moment (the floor) and wasn’t picking up much, but it was there. However, it was also closer the other day too. I disabled its microphone in it.

I do have a headset. It’s not a great one. It’s a Turtle Beach Stealth 500P. No mic on it though. I use it simply for listening. It shouldn’t* be the cause of any echo. While the headset definitely bleeds sound out, I’m not listening to myself while I record.

As for the overload, kind of? I mean, when I have the gain on the back at minimum, there seems to be the tiniest bit of wiggle room for more noise on the end if I raise my voice considerably. Like a yell where I’m getting my kids attention, but not trying to startle anyone. It does not make the wave form touch at the bottom, but I can make it barely hit the top.

If I raise the gain I can easily easily make the wave form hit top and bottom at around the halfway point on the knob with a loud voice, but not yelling.

At around 3/4s maxed out, my voice maxes out on the peak at a normal speaking voice from a shaka away without even speaking directly into the mic.

Basically, my mic has a ton of gain to work with in that knob if I need it, but my lack of knowledge also makes me wonder what testing it should accomplish and what it should mean to me. Wouldn’t raising it also raise the echo? Also increase the noise floor quite a bit?

When I just give the tiniest bit of gain my voice peaks at -7db during the same reading I’ve been doing, with a low point of around -18db I’d say it averages around the 12db mark at a glance, but that’s just my guess.

Here’s the sample. The only other change between this and the last one, other than obviously the reading, is that I disabled the mic on my webcam.

[kozikowski]

That’s more better. Perfect levels, no room echo, very low background noise (although I can still hear you beating on your desk), good presence and narration swing.

That last could just be you’re getting used to the script.



I’m going to call that good on background noise, basically -63dB after processing. No noise reduction. Noise will go down more if you stop that oak/walnut woody rumble noise.

So you’re all set to face ACX Human Quality Control, since we have the automated robot technical tests licked.

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-send-a-test-to-acx/49588/1

Koz

[alkaline_ice]

Excellent. Thank you for all the help, Koz. I don’t think I’m going to be disappearing from the forums any time soon. After all, once recorded I’m going to have a billion questions about how to get it to sound good and how to make myself sound less bad, eh?

Yeah, the rumbly shake of my desk is an issue. Now that I know about the settings and I’ll be done moving things, or at least know what to look for to make a better audio file, that means I can work on finding a good placement for myself, and for my script. The issue with the box is that there’s no room for me inside of it too. However, I haven’t had a chance to try working it with technology yet to see how well that can work. Thus far I’ve mostly been holding a physical magazine, which means it takes up quite a bit of space on its own. A phone or tablet I may be able to work with better. It’s worthwhile to move my chair and things around now too since I’ve got the final position to align things with.

Since it’s all mostly settled now, I’ll get to work on that bit and see if I can’t get this audition at least recorded before the night is done. It isn’t very long, but I’m sure I’ll find plenty of things to waste time on.

[kozikowski]

once recorded I’m going to have a billion questions about how to get it to sound good and how to make myself sound less bad, eh?

Two problems with that. ACX’s goal is for you to sound as natural as possible “No Distractions” pops up several times in their instructions. That’s what kills people trying to “rescue” their voice with Noise Reduction, Noise Gating, etc. Nobody is going to pay you for choppy, bubbly Cellphone Voice.

The other problem is marketing. The goal is to provide nothing and get people to pay a lot of money for it. The extension is to record your voice clean, post it and go home. It’s not to see how many different effects, filters and corrections you can add to the process. There’s a reason Audiobook Mastering is only three tools.

There was one poster who insisted he was going to correct every word in his reading. He may never make it past his first book.

holding a physical magazine

I may be the last person on earth working from a printed script. Many people use a tablet and at least one poster marks up her script with colors and bolds to indicate emphasis or character.

One other note. Audiobook reading is not radio theater. You should resist the urge to add special effects and music. Your metaphor is reading to kids in the library on a Saturday afternoon. Whatever you can do with your voice is fair game.

I would probably submit a test to ACX, first to experience their introduction form (a little wacky) and to find out if they have an objection to your voice that you can’t ever fix. It’s good to know that before you go to weeks of work.

For example I have too many air management problems to ever make it past the first page.

Koz

[alkaline_ice]

For example I have too many air management problems to ever make it past the first page.

I don’t have too many troubles managing to say even fairly long sentences without needing a breath. I also have this technique that may or may not be a good thing in the end, but it cuts down on the breath sounds dramatically. Since I hold so much air, I tend to take a breath between sentences, and hold it for a moment before speaking. It’s an easy cut between sentences to remove it, and I have fewer breaths in the audio. The ones that do get heard mid sentence tend not to be so bad. As a bonus, it also cuts down on a bit of mouth noise, since it lets me open my mouth before the silence before beginning to speak. I’m sure I look charismatic as heck using this technique.

As for edits altogether, about the only thing I’ve done is cut lines out and rerecorded ones that were worse off than I though. It’s probably that my inexperience makes me hear fewer problems than a professional would, however, I still think my biggest issue is just me. I had a friend listen to one take of an audition I did. Definitely needed to slow it down considerably for clarity’s sake. I recorded a smaller sample at a much slower spoken rate, and he liked it much more. I felt like he was a good choice because he’s a fluent English speaker, but he’s not a native speaker either.

I’ll go ahead and look into that test and see what they think.

[kozikowski]

It’s not the worst idea to listen to existing audiobooks to get meter and rhythm. Any public library can handle that for zero dollars.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/clips/Pro/SaraVowellAssassinationList.mp3

Koz

[alkaline_ice]

I’ve done the thing. I’ve completed an audition. I sent it in too. And I even did it in the time I set out to have it done by.

The audition is just over three minutes and twenty seconds. It took me approximately 7 rerecordings of almost every line to be satisfied enough to send it in. I didn’t time myself accurately, but I imagine, since getting set up, I’ve spent around eight hours.

Things I learned as I recorded that I didn’t know when I started to do it.

1. Always make sure to get as close to the same positioning to the mic as you can.
2. Never move your equipment.
3. There’s a huge difficulty in deciding which breath and mouth sounds to remove, and which ones to keep in. Some sound natural and don’t hurt the audio, and their absence hurts even more.
4. Always, always, always keep a raw .wav file backed up. You will delete the wrong things.
5. Listen back what you’ve recorded a couple of times, especially not line by line. Line by line, the tones will fail to match and sound spliced in.
6. Keeping a second of room noise handy for copying and pasting in, in various degrees, really helps with setting the pace. I just pasted the same second of room noise over and over throughout the file for easy access, and it saved me huge amounts of time.
7. Take it slow. If you read quickly, like you speak, you will not only make more mistakes while recording, you also lose a lot of clarity.

I probably learned a stupid amount of other things too.

[kozikowski]

get as close to the same positioning to the mic as you can.

The fancy name for that is directional microphone proximity effect. I once played two different people by changing microphone spacing and a little acting.

especially not line by line.

It’s possible to be too close to the edit and lose the swing and theater of the chapter. Another trick is listen to the whole chapter the next day.

Post back when they reply. Quote the actual message.

Koz

[alkaline_ice]

“Nice job [Alkaline]…your thotoughness is apparent…I’m gonna go ahead and send over a contract.”

I’m very thotough. That message has to be written via phone. Apparently the hours I dumped in shows, which I’m pleased about. I just need to work on the workflow now and become a lot more efficient.

[alkaline_ice]

At about 11PM, mountain time, on July 2nd, I submitted my audition to ACX to have their humans review it. I knew the author liked it, but wondered if those QA people would pass it or have any advice.

Today, on a national holiday, 9:39PM on July 4th, I got a response from them. WAAAAY sooner than the 1 week they advertised and even more of a dramatic difference compared to the two weeks I viewed on the forums.

Hello [alkaline],

Thanks for submitting your sample, “Memory_Lapse___Audition.mp3”, for review. This file currently meets all of the ACX Submission Requirements. Nice work! My biggest piece of advice would be to rely on your ears and meters more than “ACX Robots”. I assume you mean plugins like Second Opinion or ACX Check. Word of warning, these were not developed by ACX or anyone at Audible, so they don’t typically match up with our requirements exactly. There are also a few things only your ears can tell you. This being said, your sample is great, so you seem to be doing all the right things!

Good luck!

Regards,
The ACX Team
Visit ACX.com

So apparently I must be pretty golden as it is right now. I accepted the offer to do the book, so now I’m going through the document and marking it up in Google docs, writing down any questions I need the author to answer, and leaving notes to myself about how I think the audio should be said, and color coding every single dialogue thing to be said in a different voice. It’s a mess. I didn’t realize the time constraints of the job!

The original date (though I got this pushed back a bit) for the first 15 minutes was the 7th, and the final show is supposed to be done on the 31st. Seems crazy fast to me. I’ve got to babysit my niece tomorrow, but hopefully I’ll be finished reading and marking up the document by the evening so I can start the recordings, otherwise the recordings will begin the next day.

It’s about 43,000 words long, so not very long, and definitely an easier finish for someone who has the experience, but I look at all I have to do and I already feel the crunch.

[kozikowski]

WAAAAY sooner than the 1 week they advertised

They have advanced. We can only go by past experiences. As posted several times, everybody with a pulse is trying to read for audiobooks and their corporate processes and procedures do change. If you like to experience YouTube shows, a surprising number of them are sponsored by Audible. Our warning is so readers don’t expect response times as quick as the forum.

Word of warning, these were not developed by ACX or anyone at Audible, so they don’t typically match up with our requirements exactly.

Right and we say that in postings. They’re guidelines and not acid tests. ACX Check was written with a clear eye to the ACX Published Guidelines and yes, we do know how to do this stuff.

People get into trouble by doing things such as having Background Noise come in at -60.5dB and screaming “Success!!” My unofficial note is being able to pass noise by at least -65dB—reliably—before you post.

There’s another more oblique condition. ACX will sometimes claim noise failure when what they really mean was a failure of Human Quality Control. It’s not unusual for someone to produce a crappy, noisy reading, patch it together with software tools (which makes it sound even more crappy), pass ACX Check, and ship it off assured of certain success.

Maybe not. ACX insists voices sound clear and human and that’s not always easy to do at home.

Congrats.

Koz