I’m currently recording my first audiobook for ACX. Huge learning curve. This forum has been hugely useful to me so far, but there’s something I can’t find an answer to, so here goes:
Is it possible to find a workaround to listen to your files while editing at an increased speed without the chipmunk effect? I’m using currently using Play-at-Speed but find the pitch change difficult to work with. I note that it’s down on the Audacity request list, but has been for a while, so I wondered if anyone had a solution in the meantime?
You are replacing a recording studio and engineer. The home microphone people keep insisting you can set up their microphone on the kitchen table and start recording your book.
Maybe not.
Make sure you have a WAV protection backup of your work. You can apply Effect > Change Tempo to the selection and it will go by faster without changing the pitch. …But… It’s one of the two effects that are likely to create their own sound damage as they go. Effect > Change Pitch is the other one. The software has to rip your voice to pieces and put it back together in the new order. They mostly sound sort-of OK.
Effect > Change Speed just has to play the show back at a different sample rate. Piece of cake.
You are experiencing the X5 Editing Rule. Editing takes five times the length of the show. The first pass is where you write down where all the errors are, and the last is making sure you didn’t miss any errors. The three in the middle are complex editing, processing, filtering, and correcting. If you’re a new user, it can take much longer.
That’s why you get YouTube postings complaining about the time problem. A 15 minute video took them 75 minutes to edit assuming they’re really good at it and that’s not counting the original performance. After a couple of ratty performances, you get super good at performing so you don’t need editing.
One of my favorite performers used to work this to very fine granularity. He would tell people “Don’t call attention to that house on fire behind you because I will need to edit around it later and it will take forever.”
You can submit a tiny sound sample to the forum and we will see how mastering goes. It needs to be a raw sample. Do Not apply any corrections or filters. We can sometimes find serious errors at this step. Nothing like recording a book only to find that each chapter has a permanent, fatal error. There is a sister forum posting to yours where the voice artist recorded a lot of different qualities as they went. ACX wants everything to match.
You are replacing a recording studio and engineer. The home microphone people keep insisting you can set up their microphone on the kitchen table and start recording your book.
Don’t I know it! I’ve done some VO work out of a my home set up before, but a 3 minute VO is so different to a audiobook…
I find that Change Tempo wrecks the quality of the file, for the reasons you cite, so I don’t use it. The reason I asked is I had been trialling Reaper, and while I prefer Audacity, the one feature I did really like was being able to playback without a pitch change as it made a noticeable difference to my editing times. Good to know that there isn’t really an alternative…will just suck it up and get on with it!
I’ve checked in with ACX about my set up, and they have said that it will pass. Admittedly that was at the beginning of the book, and I’m now about 2/3rds way through. I’m hopeful that my work will stand up, but I’ll post you a sample and let the experts decide!
Is there a specific place in the forums to post a sample for this, or do we just start a thread with a title that indicates we would like this analysis?
That seems to work. I applied simple audiobook mastering and then ACX-Check. You should pass noise by at least -65dB and this clip does that (-66dB is quieter/better.)
The presentation is a little sharp, crisp and “essy.” I applied DeEsser and it seemed to help.
Yeah, my esses are a problem (think that’s down to a fun combo of a big ol’ over-bite and the mic I have). I’ve been using the excellent de-esser, and it works a treat (although, I do prefer doing it case-by-case rather than over the whole chapter).
I do prefer doing it case-by-case rather than over the whole chapter
You’re going to patch a whole book word by word? How close are you to retirement?
DeEsser is designed to rip down a whole chapter and only hit those words where the SSS sounds are proportionally louder than they should be. In the case of your test clip, I only counted two places where some action was taken. The rest of the words were untouched.
You can watch it work. Apply DeEsser and watch the blue waves. Only the Essy words are reduced.
Edit > Take it out. Edit > Put it back. Compare. There is an advantage of DeEssing after mastering. You only have to adjust DeEsser once. The applied voice track is always going to be the same volume because of Mastering.
Be able to point to WAV backups of your original reading. If Audacity goes into the mud and takes your project with it, you can fix the machine and open your WAV files and begin editing again. Not go find the microphone and read it again.
Be able to point to two different places that have your valuable work. The computer is one and the other can be thumb drive, external hard drives, cloud backup, etc. You can point to the computer twice assuming it has two different internal drives.
I recently had a Windows machine fail and I got to rescue some valuable work from the D:\ (second) hard drive. The C:\ (primary) drive was a loss.
I have some process news. Possibly not in your case because you’ve read before, but it’s not unusual for a new user to get to the end of a book, realize what trash the first few chapters were and read them again. You finish the book a seasoned professional.
It’s almost 100% certain the Essing is the microphone. Makers do that because they think it sounds more “professional.” It gives me a headache.
Rode USB - and I know, I know - it’s not good enough. It was just what I could afford at the time becuase my poor old Samson C01U wouldn’t cut it on the noise floor (static hiss, wasn’t fixed by changing the cable).
It’s almost 100% certain the Essing is the microphone. Makers do that because they think it sounds more “professional.” It gives me a headache.
I was afraid of that. The C01U gave me much warmer tones with less silibance, and I’m not that keen on the Rode for my voice so I am looking to upgrade when I can.
You’re going to patch a whole book word by word? How close are you to retirement?
Yeah, ok, I’m making things hard for myself, I realise! I have just found that my esses are inconsistent - sometimes when I apply the plugin to the whole track I end up with some esses that sound like I have a lisp, and the worst ones aren’t attenuated enough? I don’t know whether it’s because I’m doing a lot of character voices so the profiles are different? Or maybe I’m just not using the plugin correctly - I had been using it before mastering, so maybe that’s where I’m going wrong. I do know about using the ‘isolate changes’ bit so I’m going to have another play with it today.
Be able to point to WAV backups of your original reading.
Yup, I back everything up as WAV files and store in two different places already, but thanks for the reminder.
You finish the book a seasoned professional.
Here’s hoping! Still feel like I have a lot to learn… :-/
The NT1-A USB has a “presence boost” in the range 2 to 10 kHz, rising to around +7 dB in the 5 to 6 Hz range.
This does not suit all voices and may overemphasize sibilance.
That presence boost may be countered by applying Equalization to reduce that range.
