I have made a foolish mistake: In an attempt to conform a chapter of my book to ACX standards, I have used the Envelope tool and control points to adjust volume. A couple of good tutorials and some research on compression and normalization later, I realize I can do this better and more consistently using chained effects. So, I’m left with one chapter with lots of control points. Three questions:
When I switch to the Envelope tool, the normal gray area around the signal changes to a two-level track … dark-gray surrounding light-gray (see attached). What’s the significance? Can’t figure out from manual.
More important: Is there any way to remove all control points, other than one-by-one?
For all chapters except this one, I have made WAV copies of the original material. I know WAV and AIFF are not much compressed compared to mp3, but how much do I lose if I have to deep six a project and restart with the WAV? Significant for a mono voice track or not?
There’s not much significance to it other than that each “control point” has 4 draggable points. The inner points allow you to drag the envelop so as to increase the gain (make the waveform bigger vertically).
The usual way to remove control points is to just drag them off the track (one by one).
A little “unofficial” trick to remove ALL envelope points from a track is to select the entire track, then run this code in the Nyquist Prompt
;version 4
;codetype lisp
*track*
Note that this relies on the fact that Nyquist does not currently support envelope points, which may not always be the case.
Worked like ancharm. My music-composing son said when I went into his studio to record my book and asked whether I should use Pro Tools, “Try audacity first. It’s grown powerful, and there are good instructions and a great forum.” Boy, was he right, particularly on the Forum part. (And yes, I donated.)
It is strongly recommended that you Export WAV safety copies of all original work just to avoid this problem. If your processing or editing turns to peanut butter, you can just trash it all and open up the protection copy.
WAV is an uncompressed format and essentially perfect. You know when you picked the compression quality for your MP3? 128, 320, etc? Stereo WAV quality is 1400.
Do that at the other end, too. When you get your final edit, export it as Final Archive WAV. Only Then make the MP3 for ACX audiobook posting.
ACX wants submission in 192 quality MP3 (minimum) and they strongly recommend mono (one blue wave) over stereo.
