I am hoping someone can help me with an issue I am having. I have my first project to record through ACX, but I realized that when I record in mono, which is what we are suppose to do, my audio waves peak at .5 on the recording scale. If I record in stereo, the waves will go all the way up to 1 if i am loud. In mono it seems like the recording is being automatically compressed and I can’t understand why. I have googled with no luck. My best option now seems to be to record each chapter/section in stereo and than split it to mono before I extract the file. But then of course I have to switch it back to stereo again when I want to start recording the next book section. Has anyone dealt with this issue? Is there something I am overlooking? Any help would be awesome, thanks in advance!
It’s old news. When the computer switches your stereo microphone adapter to mono, it “makes room” for a volume boost.
When you sit in front of stereo (two) microphones, you produce two full-volume copies of your voice. If all you did was add them up and make mono, you would get double volume and overload damage.
So to avoid that, the system adds them up and divides by two. Your problem happens when you have one microphone.
If you like the way your system sounds now, you have two choices: Split to mono and delete one track, or continue to record slightly low volume in mono and boost the show volume later by 6dB using either amplify or normalize.
Actually, if you use our Audiobook Mastering Suite, the tools in there will take care of that boost for you.
That’s the tests they do just to get you in the door. Voice volume, noise, etc. After you do that, you still have to pass Human Quality Control where they test for theatrical quality, voice distortion, etc. Those can’t be easily automated.
It probably depends on the audio device drivers, but with well behaved drivers it will pass the left channel only if the device is a 2 channel (stereo) device, and for mono devices will pass the one channel without modification.
