Mix and Render problems-question.

[Edward1]

I'm working with Audacity 2.1.2 on a Dell Inspiron 15 with a terabyte of storage (mostly unused). It's a 64-bit system with 16 gigs of RAM. The OS is Windows 8.1


I'm having trouble with the sound file of an audiobook that I'm working on. After searching the forum I have a feeling I know the answer and dreading what it's going to mean for the mountains of work ahead of me. I wish I had paid more attention to the audiobook section of the forum before today. As I read it the ACX people at Amazon (who control practically the whole audiobook market) hate sound files that have noise reduction or other effects used to excess. I'm also finding out that Audacity does too. I have been trying to work with just such a file, trying to correct for an environment that's too loud to really record in properly. I have been using a lot of noise reduction, pitch changes for dramatic effect or simply to change a character voice and using the amplify effect to control or minimize various track volumes. I am finding that Audacity is refusing to consider other tracks when it mixes and renders such a file. I wind up with basically just the narration track and whatever horrors have been performed upon it. What this means to me is that I'm going to have to go back and start from scratch and use as few special-effects as possible and export the whole megilla of narrative tracks as pure unadulterated WAV files as Masters and then work from copies. I don't know why I didn't think of it before, it would've saved me a lot of work.

I do have a question – some of my character voices that I'm using are not being initially recorded by me in the same environment, although the people doing it for me are using Audacity. There seems to be a distinct difference in the room tone or the echo effect that I'm hearing and I don't know how to "normalize" and get them all to sound the same as if they were in the same studio. In this case I don't think "normalize" is really the term I'm looking for. I would sure like to know what is and how to use it. This problem has nothing to do with software playback echo or a delayed signal, none of that is being used. I have mixed in the recent past some pretty good files that came out pretty well. At least they sound good to me. But if you know of a robotic piece of ACX software that I read about in one of your columns I would like to know how to acquire it and use it periodically to make sure I'm on the right road as I continue with this process.
Edward1

[DVDdoug]

I am finding that Audacity is refusing to consider other tracks when it mixes and renders such a file. I wind up with basically just the narration track

There is a Mixing Tutorial that might help. (It's about mixing dialog and music but the concepts should work.)

There seems to be a distinct difference in the room tone or the echo effect that I'm hearing and I don't know how to "normalize" and get them all to sound the same

That's a tough one. You can add room sound (noise) to the quieter recording but you probably don't want to do that. You can also add a little artificial reverb, but you probably don't want to do that either. And as you know, removing noise (or reverb) to match the quieter environment isn't always perfect either.

and export the whole megilla of narrative tracks as pure unadulterated WAV files as Masters and then work from copies.

In the future, it's a good idea to save the original unprocessed recordings unless you know you don't want to keep a take.