I’m in the process of editing an audio book and have some sections in each chapter that are significantly louder than their surrounding sections. This is unpleasant and distracting to the listener. What is the best method for manually bringing down the volume of these sections, while still meeting ACX’s submission guidelines? Attached is a small audio sample with a too loud section that needs to be brought down. The too loud audio is from 5-8secs.
Thank you for your assistance,
Logan
You can use the [u]Envelope Tool[/u] can be used to fade-up & fade-down the sound where needed. The trick is to leave the end-points at no-change so there are no sudden changes.
The Leveller effect or the compressor or limiting may also help but they are more likely to mess-up your ACX compliance and they may not sound as natural as doing it manually.
Any volume adjustment will also adjust the background noise & “room sound”, so be careful. (Compression generally brings-up all quiet sounds, including background noise.)
Just changing the volume is not going to work because there is also a very noticeable difference in timbre. Even after matching the level, the difference in tone is still distracting.
I’m trying to figure what you did differently in that part. I presume that you have tried to drop in a recording that was made at a different time. Did you use the same microphone, same distance to the mic, same room, same everything? Did you process the audio differently?
Hi Steve,
You are indeed correct. This recording was made at a time when I did not have a set recording space (I do now thankfully). So audio is recorded in two different environments using the same mc. I’ve done the best I can to smooth out differences by compressing and normalizing.
It’s possible to equalize the loud sections so they match the frequency-response of the rest of the audio by applying the EQ curve below , (only apply to the loud sections). The EQ curve can be imported into Audacity’s equalizer via the XLM file attached
