if you PM me your email addy
Just because I’m a little nervous about passing out my email address, why don’t you post with a fake address and then tell me what you did.
Koz
I don’t think that does what you think it does. My email link takes me to Open New Account, not to your show.
In general, people post work and open it up to Everyone-Always. We get the work and then they close the posting.
Also, it is suggested that the whole work is up there, not just chapter two. I don’t know about doing that, either.
Koz
I think there is very probably one violation or condition that’s causing problems and finding that one violation could suggest cures for everything, not just that one chapter. This is also strongly suggested to maintain chapter matching.
Koz
Yes, I think so … I hope so, anyway. I can’t imagine why you’d want to slog through the entire audiobook. That’s my job! I was happy you were willing to give feedback on just a chapter! How can I get it to you if you don’t have or want a Dropbox account? Do you have OneDrive or GoogleDocs or something? I’ve never tried to share a WAV file through those, but I suppose it would work.
Trying something else here … Does this link work? Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life
I don’t need any of those. I’m a dot-com. But that’s for outgoing.
I’m not going to shlog thru the whole thing. I’m going to look for common symptoms, conditions and errors. Some, like wandering RMS generally only happen over the course of a chapter reading.
And then there’s the single gunshot thing (also bumping the microphone by accident). Audacity has tools to show me that (I wish there were tools to show me all the common errors).
Koz
I have the cut.
Analyzing now.
Koz
I’m glad I got the whole chapter. You have two what appears to be very odd technical problems. There are two disturbances, one at 14.15.776 and the other at 17.45.511. They take up room, but don’t necessarily sound like anything. In a normal sound system, you would never know they were there. But on my system, they sound like someone walloped me soundly with a feather pillow. Wooom. They are not P Pop sounds or other vocal artifacts (that I can tell), and they vanish perfectly with Steve’s vocal filter. But I’ve never seen that before…
Past being there, it’s possible they are harbingers of something going wrong.
The rest of the cut is very theatrical. “Eye that grasped the BIG picture INSTANTly.” The people who do this for big paychecks know how to stress their voices to sound like they’re making a point…without getting louder. I’m choosing a suite of corrections. It’s remarkably resistant to simple corrections, leading me to wonder how you got the first chapter to pass…
You are Exporting a cut but not processed WAV of each chapter, right? Alternately, RAW reading WAV?
As we go.
Koz
Trevor Whitlash had never before experienced anything like the sudden amorous advances of the beautiful Clarissa.
“Why, Mr. Whitlash,” said Clarissa in a calm, reassured voice. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable without that stiff collar and formal overcoat?”
All of Mr. Whitlash’s business instincts called out to him the dangers of pursuing the current course, yet Clarissa’s suggestions seemed so natural, so inevitable. Her hands so inviting as they gently…
I got it to pass without seeming to do anything, but in reality, I had to beat it with a stick to get it there. I need to go in again and see maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Koz
Missing?? Uh … you seem to be missing my file. :riffling through book to make sure that passage appears nowhere:
I’m a complete slave to temptation, as apparently is Mr. Whitlash.
Attached is blue waves before and after. Most of the sticking-up spikes in Before are theatrical expression. Two somewhere on the right are your odd sound distortion.
Note After. The waves are a good deal fuller and dense with no sticking up and down parts. That’s the one that passes. The fullness of the blue waves carry the RMS (loudness). And even through all that, you only pass RMS by the thinnest of margins.
And this is how I got there. LF-Rolloff and Limiter are downloads, as, of course, was ACX-Check. They don’t come with stock Audacity…yet.
Open the chapter.
Effect > Equalization: LF Rolloff, Length about 5000 > OK
Effect > Normalize [X] Remove DC, [X]Normalize to -3.5dB > OK
Effect > Limiter: Soft, 0, 0, -6dB, 10, No > OK
Effect > Normalize [X] Remove DC, [X]Normalize to -3.5dB > OK
Effect > Compressor: -20, -40, 2.5:1, 0.2 secs, 1 sec. > OK
Effect > Normalize [X] Remove DC, [X]Normalize to -3.5dB > OK
ACX Check
Koz
OMG will try this and get back to you … hoping against hope that your recipe works on more than Chapter 2! You are a genius. Thank you.
I expect all those tool settings to stick. So it should be possible to Effect > Choose Effect > OK.
Repeat for the other tools. Bang, bang, bang.
You only have to crank through that detail setup list the first time.
That’s one reason Normalize is configured like that. [X]Remove DC is only use the first time and doesn’t do anything after that, but if I include it, you can use Normalize repeatedly, anywhere, without thinking about it.
“Your hands are so soft,” said Mr Whitlash, his normally sharp, clear business acumen beginning to fade into a soft cloud…
Koz
your recipe works on more than Chapter 2!
It better. I think that’s the only way you’re going to get the chapters to match.
“Your hair smells so sweet,” said Mr Whitlash, all sensation ebbing from his knees as he slowly sat on the divan and drew Clarissa next to him.
“So kind of you to say, Mr. Whitlash,” said Clarissa, carefully folding her bonnet and gloves.
Koz
You are hilarious. I’m sure anyone else reading this board will go buy “Playing to Win” after they’ve had a big fat laugh at my characters’ expense … poor Clarissa! LOL!
The temptation to abandon the character plot lines and go off the rails is extraordinary.
Koz
Still, if you got chapter one to pass with minimal, plain processing and I had to go through all those tools, this is still a “What’s wrong with this picture” problem.
We are on the edges of our seats when you reveal what happens to chapter three. Hurry, our knees are falling asleep.
We know that reading for audiobooks gets better as you go. It’s not unusual for a new reader to get to the end of the first book and realize how much better they’d gotten, what complete trash the beginning of the book is, and decide to read it all over again. Thankfully, you don’t have that problem.
The elves are developing better tools for this work as we speak. I am very much dancing around the barn to force ACX compliance because those are the tools I have available.
A case in point is ACX-Test. There is a way to check ACX technical compliance step-by-step, completely manually with the older tools. It’s neither quick, efficient nor straightforward, and some of the answers are a by-product of tools doing something else. They are serendipitous accidents.
http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/ACXTesting/ACXTesting.html
You can do it that way if you want. I’ll use ACX-Check.
Koz
Did you enjoy the story? If that’s dangerously close to what happens in the book I am going to go hide under a rock somewhere.
“Good night, Trevor Whitlash,” Clarissa leaved over and kissed him.
Koz
I enjoyed your story very much but am nevertheless sticking with my own. Too many people have read the print version, so I can’t get away with patching your ending onto it. What a bummer. I wish I’d thought of having Clarissa seduce and murder Mr. Whitlatch, but hey, too late now. Next time I shall certainly seek your advice before I begin. In fact, I may have you write the entire book for me, because you clearly grasped the concept right away and are a much faster writer than I am.
I followed your recipe for all the chapters, adding noise reduction after compression. Passed the ACX check!!! 
Uploading!!! Will report back at whatever point I get approved … or not. Fingers crossed.
I don’t usually get that much of a head start. I usually do those just from the appearance or sound of someone’s name. This was like walking into a Swiss candy store. Not only did I have names, but characters, and character development. I’ve always said I needed good typing skills to keep up with my head generating the story.
What would have been Twilight-Zone creepy is to have me accidentally hit your story—and I’ve never seen the end of the book.
I may have you write the entire book for me, because you clearly grasped the concept right away and are a much faster writer than I am.
That did occur to me as I was writing that, but even at high speed, there is the actual weeks of hard work writing a book.
Oh, right. Work.
But there is another problem. I tend to run out of steam at short-story length. I tried to write a movie script. Los Angeles, right? My plumbing practitioner has a movie script. But no matter what I did, the story kept coming to a satisfactory close at short-story length, not a 90 minute movie.
I think I still have a license for Final Draft script-writing software here somewhere. That stuff is a marvel. It gets used to your style and automatically switches characters and movie script formatting for you as you go.
So even if I did start to write a book, I could get twelve pages in and everybody lived happily ever after. The End. It could be published in pamphlet form. I marvel at people who can keep a plot going for 500 pages.
To bring this back to Audacity briefly, you submitted a chapter to ACX? Or submitted all of them with that last suite of corrections? What happened?
Koz
I have a nephew who is a gifted writer of short stories. We all have to write what the muse sends us, right? I keep urging him to self-publish a collection; he has a blog with gazillions of followers. There has to be a market out there for a clever voice like yours.
Um … the process was a little too smooth. I popped all 25 chapters plus epilogue (plus intro, closing credits, and sample) into the queue and while they were uploading I moved on to sign the contract. Didn’t realize that the instant I did that, all the files still in the queue would stop loading. So now it’s “pending audio review” with only the first 14 chapters uploaded. And it’s Thanksgiving weekend, so I can’t reach anybody.
If I had a brain, I’d be dangerous.