Using 2.x on Windows 7.
You can be using Audacity 2 and still have a bogus or fake Audacity. The current version is 2.1.0. When you install a fresh Audacity it will ask you if you want to reset the preferences. Say yes. That should give you a “clean” install.
http://audacityteam.org/download/windows
I don’t know what happens to your plugins if you do that. I keep safety copies of all my favorite plugins in case anything happens to the Audacity license.
ACX says -23db & -18db range for RMS. What drop down do I use, then what sub topic to put this in so it is always there.
If I understand what you’re asking, ‘how do I record so my show naturally comes out ACX compliant?’ Audacity doesn’t apply filters, tools or effects in real time. It’s a frequent request. So the best you can do is record straight, quiet and as perfect as you possibly can and then use post production processing to gently nudge the presentation into compliance.
The better you can do up front, the less processing you’ll need later—but there’s a limit. It’s reeeely common to produce a slightly low volume voice recording and then have high background noise in the same shoot. That’s typical of a “home recording.” Those are very difficult to fix and some you can’t fix. If you have to work too hard to “clean up” the show, ACX may reject it for “overprocessing.”
That’s an actual ACX failure. I didn’t make that up.
The object is listening to a friend telling you a story over cups of hot tea, not the mechanical telephone voice telling you to “Press One” for more options.
Without question the live recording kills more people than anything else. There is a parallel posting from someone who is doing very well, I was able to make his performance ACX compliant with very little work and he has a voice suited to storytelling, but I think he’s recording in his kitchen. There’s no fix for room reverberation and echoes.
The hardware and software is not killing his show. His room is.
There are fuzzy rules of thumb. When you speak, your voice should many times peak at -6dB in the yellow zone. Nobody will shoot you if this isn’t perfect, but you should hit it many times a minute. Yes, this means you have to speak, read the script and watch the meters at the same time. So if you were planning on putting the computer in the garage because it makes too much noise (not a bad idea), some method will have to be found so you can still see the screen. People have used remote monitors effectively.
When you stop talking, the sound meters should sink to at least -60dB. Further to the left (quieter) is good.
The quick version of those three specifications:
Peaks
That’s overload. Much higher than that and you run the risk of damaging the sound by making it too loud.
RMS
That’s a fancy name for loudness. That’s so audience doesn’t have to constantly turn the volume up and down to listen to the show.
Noise
What happens when you stop talking? Can you hear traffic in front of the house, computer fan noise, refrigerator or much worse, noises that the microphone itself is making? This is the specification that’s most difficult to meet in home recording and the three specifications interact. Reduce the volume to help the noise and the speaking volume goes down.
As an experiment just to make sure I’m not blowing smoke, I did a cold voice recording with a rock-band microphone, simple sound mixer and a Mac in a quiet bedroom at night. I needed one special filter to get rid of hum and just volume changes to conform to ACX.
So it can be done, but my test would be much more difficult without that quiet bedroom.
Koz