Come Thursday I will be back in business.
We should remember that by “Back In Business” we mean getting good at recording your voice without all the computer problems.
Did you print out your work? Are you going to read it from a tablet or other electronic device? All work, but whatever you do should be pretty much silent.
You probably should not read chapters and chapters without checking everything is going OK. ACX has a process by which you can submit a Quality Control test for evaluation.
And the act of submitting the actual work has its own lists of requirements.
https://www.acx.com/help/acx-audio-submission-requirements/201456300
More than one performer has cranked through all the actions for publication and got bounced because they put the wrong number of seconds of Room Tone in the chapters. You do have to pay attention.
One of the complaints about stand-alone recorders is needing to connect them to the computer. Computer makers have determined we don’t need cables any more, and so have left out many of the connectors we do really still need. Make sure you can connect everything. Being obsessive, I also get the adapter that allows me to connect the memory chip to the computer without the H2.
Is it a legitimate technique to amplify the heck out of room noise to ‘hear’ it?
As a diagnostic tool, yes. that’s sometimes the only way to figure out what the noise is. But it’s not fair to Dive For Noise just to set Noise Reduction values. If you have gentle rain hiss—normal background noise—all you have to do is pass the ACX -60dB value (with a hand-full of dB for safety) and you can submit. If you have any other noise like the motor hum thing, then it’s a bit more exciting. You have to do that by listening. Enough Noise Reduction to suppress noises like that may also harm your voice. That’s why we urge strongly to get rid of the motor.
The last noise is the Yeti Curse. Some Yeti microphones and computers hate each other and the voice has a screeching whine to it.
That’s so bad and so common we designed a special tool for it. After weeks of batting it around, we determined there is no cure other than replace the computer or the microphone type. The same microphone type by anybody is going to have the same problem. “Affordable USB Microphone” where they left out important parts to get the price down.
When it comes and you get set up, do that 20 second voice test thing and submit it. We can usually tell in the first few seconds whether there’s going to be a problem or not. It’s probably going to record stereo (two blue waves). Audacity > Tracks > Mix > Mix Stereo Down To Mono. You should not get a large change in volume. You can do everything in stereo (two blue waves) and everybody will allow you to do it, but unless you have a religious commitment to stereo, mono is far better. It naturally appears in both ears, storage is twice as fast and takes up half the space. Transmission to ACX is twice as fast. Corrections, filtering and effects are twice as fast. ACX Strongly recommends working in mono.
ACX urges submitting in mono, yes, but requires MP3, not WAV. Your own personal archive should be in WAV, but you will need to install the LAME app to make MP3 in Audacity.
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Do you ever use the remote?
None of mine has a remote. That can be sticky because the obvious use for a remote would be surveillance, law enforcement and conflict management. We do not support any of those activities.
Koz