I’m attaching my unedited recording if that helps.
It would. But that’s not what that is. You posted an AUP file which is an Audacity Project Manager file. It’s text instructions, not sound. If you want a sound file, you have to export one.
It would be good to post a sample. Use this format.
https://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/TestClip/Record_A_Clip.html
Read down the blue links. They’re very short.
Having dead silence in your work does sound a little funny, but that’s not the major reason dead silence is a problem. Since nobody can record that in their home studio (or any other studio), it means you “messed with the sound,” and ACX doesn’t much like that. They have a failure called “overprocessing.” They used to carefully and critically analyze a performer’s work and give the benefit of the doubt, but that was before the sickness. Now, everybody with respiration and a pulse wants to read for audiobooks. One mistake and it’s full stop. Next!
It’s possible your pause and resume is causing troubles. We might be able to tell that in your test.
ACX Check looks for a brief quiet period in your performance, measures it, and assumes everything else matches. It might not. If that one quiet piece is the only quiet piece, then your performance is broken and it will probably fail other tests later. ACX Check works in a similar manner to ACX’s own hardware test. After you make it through that, you then have to pass Human Quality Control where a real person listens to it to find out if you’re theatrically marketable. Nobody is going to pay you to read to them if your voice scares the horses.
A word on recording hygiene. It’s an amazingly good idea to export a WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit sound file when you get to the end of a reading—before you start editing, correcting, and filtering. Count the forum posts from people whose computer fell over dead half-way through an edit session, and they had no backup.
ACX wants you to produce your final work (Edit Master) as a WAV first and only then burn the MP3 for submission. If they find something minor wrong you need to fix the WAV and then make a new MP3. You can’t edit an MP3 without causing damage.
You would think you should Save an Audacity Project rather than exporting a WAV file. You can do both, but Audacity Projects are more brittle than WAV files and more likely to fail.
Count the forum posts of people whose Project will not open. The new version of Audacity is going to do projects a different way and is less likely to Hindenburg on you.
Koz