Hard Limiter

[kozikowski]

I may be able to remember the earlier process for audiobook mastering. There was one. It was a little more involved, but it did work. It was the model for the current one.

There was one before that, too, but it qualifies as an instrument of torture by the State of California. Not recommended.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Oh. I remember this. You had to import Low Rolloff for Speech custom curve and settings into Effect > Equalization and then be careful how you used it. That's the rumble filter needed because so many home microphones have low pitch noise and distortion.

Attached LF_rolloff_for_speech.xml.zip

LF_rolloff_for_speech.xml.zip

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Unzip it to the .xml file and install it in Effect > Equalization. I'll remember how to do that any minute now.

You sure you can't borrow a more modern computer for a while.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Effect > Equalization > Manage > Import: point it to the .xml file > OK.

And then run it. I don't remember the magic for that, but when you get it installed and running, it should look like this.

Screen Shot 2020-11-04 at 5.17.29 PM.png (73.25 KiB) Viewed 102 times

If you have a very deep, rumbly announcing voice, Low Rolloff may take a little of the gutsiness out of it, but it's worth it because of everything else it does.

I need to go look for an older machine to recall all the steps.

Koz

[kozikowski]

You need to download and install RMS Normalize. The older Audacity didn't have a convenient way to set RMS (loudness).

rms-normalize.ny

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I know this looks like a college class in effects and software management, but when you get it done, it's three steps to go from raw reading to audiobook submission—assuming you read in a quiet, echo-free room and don't make any mistakes.

All that and it sounds exactly like you with no noticeable distortion.

Effect > Equalization: Low Rolloff, length about 5000 > OK.
Effect > RMS Normalize: -20dB > OK.
Effect > Soft Limiter: -3.5dB and I don't remember the other settings, but they were default.

That's it. I announced into a Zoom stand-alone sound recorder, cut it to length, applied those three tools and made it past the ACX technical requirements for audiobooks—according to ACX. I submitted it. That was back when they allowed you to do that.



That wasn't high enough, so I had to add one roll of "bathroom tissue" to the stack to get it up to mouth level.

Koz

[steve]

I was going to get latest, but it says its not supported by windows 7.

Audacity 2.4.2 "probably" does work on Windows 7. We have multiple reports saying that it does, but Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft. We do not officially support obsolete operating systems, we do not test on Windows 7, and if there are any issues that only occur on Windows 7 they will probably not be fixed unless they are also relevant to supported operating systems.

Obviously it would be best to upgrade your operating system as soon as possible, but if you are stuck for now with Windows 7, you could try Audacity 2.4.2 and if it does not work for you, revert back to an earlier version. Most of the old releases are available here: https://www.fosshub.com/Audacity-old.html