Me too. I’m even more of a newbie than you & your wife. I’ve used Audacity for a number of years, but mostly for recording streaming audio off of the internet & recording some my college basketball & football games, especially if I won’t have the opportunity to listen to them live.
I’ve been interested in trying to do some podcasting & audio books for awhile, though, and an author I semi-know via the internet said he’d give me a crack at narrating one of his books, even though he’s skeptical that there’s a market for them. So I took the big plunge & bought some equipment. I’m in the process of waiting for it to be delivered.
I listened to Koz’s “frying mosquitos clip.” I couldn’t hear the mosquitos, which might be because of my tinnitus. Will have to get someone else to listen to it as well.
To be honest, I couldn’t hear it either when I listened the first few times. I wasn’t sure if that was because of my low quality stereo, which has a bit of hum & hiss in it, or if it was me. I’m in my late 50s & undoubtedly haven’t taken care of my hearing as I should have.
I just figured out I could download that clip & yours & look at them & listen to them in Audacity, however, and did so. This time I did hear those frying mosquitoes, but it certainly wouldn’t have been at a level that I would ever have been worried about if it was for my own use. Trying to meet the apparently strict standards of ACX is a different matter, however.
Do you know how to pull down & expand the Audacity sound meters? I did so and it does give good visual insight into those levels. ACX requires an average background level below -60 dB, I believe.
In looking at Koz’ other mic test that did pass those standards, I watched those bouncing meters occasionally jump up into the -40s briefly, but disappear below the visible part of the chart at about -60 or so for most of the time. I’m not sure how to get the average from Audacity, though I think it’s possible, but the bottom line was that it can pass even if it occasionally jumps up very briefly into a higher sound level range.
In contrast to the passing clip, the meters on Koz’ frying mosquitoes clip bounced around in the -40s the whole time hitting a high of a little over -41 dB and a low around -47 dB or so. ACX would reject that clip whether some of listeners would be able to hear it or not, for whatever reason.
Your clip, newMike_driver3_15_19 was worse than Koz’ frying mosquitoes clip. In the quiet 2 second portion before your wife started narrating it looked to me like the Audacity meters went from a low of about -43 dB or so to a high of almost -25 dB. The quiet section at the end seemed to fluctuate in the -40s up to about -38 dB. That sounds like it would be 20 dB or more above the requisite ACX noise floor. If that’s mostly due to the microphone it probably means that mic just won’t work for narrating ACX audiobooks regardless of the room.
As noted above, I’m far from any expert on it, but it sounds to me like you could fix that problem by trading that USB mic back in for a Cloudlifter and using it with your Shure SM7B, mixer & UCA-202 interface.
