This tutorial is for audiobook narrators working with ACX. I cover how to use audacity to meet ACX requirements and remove breaths and mouth noises. wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Au... forum.audacityteam.org/viewto...
Hearing you misspeak makes me feel so much better. I want to do audiobook narration, but I tend to read faster than my brain can comprehend. So knowing I can fix where I say something incorrectly easily makes me feel so much better.
PSA: I still don't know why Chains won't show up in older versions of Audacity but I did figure it out for the newest (2.3.0). They changed "Chains" to "Macros" and put it under a different/new tab: Tools. I hope this will save someone's sanity.
Something that can help you visually identify breaths which don’t show up on the waveform: Click on the track name, and select “both” for the spectral/waveform display. Breaths show up as light blue on the spectral display, and clicks show up as bright red/white.
Dude, you just saved me $200 on an online coarse. I knew I should google how to do this, but your video is more than I expected! Such complete detail! You're simply wonderful. Thank you
Especially the part with the punch copy/paste plugin helped me a lot! - Since I´ve got a lack of lung capacity (I´m also not able to inrease the capacity with training), I need to take deep and audible breaths in between my sentences - it always annoyed the heck out of me, when I´m reading the scripts for my videos... Today, I finally had the first recording, which passed every ACX-Check! Thank you!
An other way to get the same result: select the breathing, go to noise reduction, take that sample, and then adjust the settings to reduce/remove it but keeping your recording sounding natural
This was an excellent video on using Audacity. Best and most useful I have ever come across. I have installed the pluggins and use them. So much easier and faster. Wish I would have come across this a year ago.
Excellent video - im a newbie narrator. I am also "device challenged". I learned a lot and you answered many questions I had. Thank you so much. You have a new subscriber.
This is great content! Thank you Jacob!! I agree with Mapuana, I have listened to many and searched several videos for Audacity and ACX tutorials. I just subscribed to your channel. Again thank you!
Fantastic video! I started out narrating just for fun, but have decided recently to try to educate myself in this area and turn it into a skill. This was extremely helpful. I will say however, that the "clean room noise" you were using was not clean on my headphone setup. I could hear some sort of bumping in the background. I'm using a Bravo Audio hybrid headphone amp with Sony MDR-XB920 headphones. I suppose nearly no one listening to audiobooks will be using headphone amps, etc. But I thought it was worth pointing out in terms of the importance of using quality headphones, etc. when editing your narration, etc. Again, thanks so much for sharing this information!
Great overview for people wanting to get started. I’m a big guy and worried my huffing and puffing would be a serious issue. Maybe not so much with some knowledge
One of the simplest & best short videos available on this this topic. Thanks. I'm very new and still learning before going "pro."My attempts still, however, sound a little tinny/trebly/mouth noisy (although they do pass Audacity's ACX Check) so I'm wondering how much I can afford to fiddle with Equalization without sounding too muffled? Personally, I find most audible samples of best-selling audio-books at Amazon quite muffled so perhaps it's simply personal preference . . . ?
Thank you so much for this! It was incredibly informative. Out of interest, when you made your chain did you just input the stuff from the Audiobook Mastering page? Or did you come up with the values yourself? I'm new to audacity and would like to use the chain function but am worried about making a mistake.
Great video. But i have to ask - with this being a 40 sec clip of speech, wouldnt this become nightmarishly tedious narrating say, a 30 hour book? Could one deliberately make some breathing and mouth noises at the beginning of the clip to create a more effective audio profile for the noise reduction tool?
I have watched maybe 75 Audacity tutorials for VO/Narration and this is by far the most helpful one. Thanks for taking the time to put it together for us. I was manually doing some of the same steps without the plugins. Do you also remove background noise? My space is treated but it can still be a noisy environment.
I don't use any noise reduction, but I have a fairly good space for recording. I think it's best to avoid noise problems by making sure your space is well treated and your mic is good.
I'd love to learn how to get rid of unwanted saliva and click sounds when speaking. Really annoying when you have a perfect take and it's ruined by that.
This exactly what I was looking for - Normally me as a Musician I am using Logic Pro X since many years and know how to master, but with regards, the ACX requirements its a bit tough for me. But this video, wow, really helped me a lot. Only concern now is the ACX Check. Even though I copied it into the Plug In folder, it does not appear under "Analyze" ..... Please can you help ? - - - Update: found the answer its its working now - You also need to enable it in the Plug-in Manager (use top item in either the analyse or Effects menu).
Jacob are you using a Mac? Is there a version of this for PC? The video was very good and I will have to listen to it a lot to get all of the shortcuts down. Thanks for exposing Audacity learning points, I have been learning about VO for just over a year and it seems I have much more to learn. I wish I could see the moves you were making clearer, your screen was small on my computer but the content was great.
Greetings, I noticed a number of mouth sounds internal to words... do you try and fix those as well? If so, how do you do so when the waveform is "dense" - I just cannot make them out in those areas.... I get the non-dense areas, the mount sounds stick out like sore thumbs and then using the pencil you can trace them out (if you zoom in on the left hand scale you get to a point where you see dots - and you can redraw the waveform).... but those dense areas.... sheesh!
Just seems so time consuming (stone age) to have to manually copy/paste over every breath. Doesn't the 2.2.2 versions (& later) of Audacity have a feature like the "Noise Gate" feature that the old versions had?? Thx
Hey Jacob, I'm just wondering when recording at home ok audacity (using a rode mic with pop filter) how strict are audacity on the background white noise? I'm recording at home and don't have sound proofing, and to me there is a little background sound but not sure how to reduce this.... As to reduce it I need to take a noise sample but don't have anything quieter than what I already have??
This feels cumbersome. One breathes a lot in reading 10 hours of audio books! Is there a better option? Or is it ok to be heard breathing? Perhaps the listener can breathe, too?
Can anyone help me please? I don't have the RMS Normalize under my effects menu. I'm reading and searching the audacity site and it seems like it should come with ACX check?? Which I finally managed to get installed but no RMS Normalize. I did at one point see it under my plug-in manager and enabled it but now it has seemed to disappear. I'm so frazzled for two days trying to figure this out. If anyone can help I would be REALLY grateful! :)
Total newbie here, but I could follow you. Thanks! I cannot figure out how to install the punch copy/paste plugin (Mac). I did Google as you mentioned, but a lot of unhelpful things came up.
@@AsparroVideo I'm with you...my guess is that it's now called "Sound finder & Silence finder" under "Analyze". Since this forum dates back almost a year ago, I'm guessing some things have changed since ;-)
Great video. Thanks. One question though - I've downloaded ACX Check three times and it's in my downloads but does not show up in Audacity Tools or Analyze to enable
Thanks so much for this video But, I have a question. I record an average of 10 to 15 pages per day is that normal or I need to speed up ? And If I need to speed up how can I do that ,please ?
Why is it when i run acx check and it says my audio passes everything. Then i submit then two weeks later Acx says i failed and does not meet the requirements. Is there an updated version of this acx check i should download?
So I followed the links to download the plug ins but the RMS Normalize and the ACX-Check both just lead to prompting to re-install Audacity but after it is done I cannot find the plug-ins. Can you or someone who sees this comment help with this?
I am trying to download the plug ins mentioned including ACX check but I get a pop up that says "there is no application set to open the document "acx-check.ny"". anyone have thoughts on that? thanks!
Wait... does ACX require that there be NO BREATH SOUNDS? I'd have to comb through 8 hours of voice to find 6500 instances of breath sound to fix before submitting to acx? Isn't there a plugin or something - anything - that can fix this without spending hours and days on this?
I failed to mention it in the video, but you also need to download and install the RMS Normalize plugin from the Audacity Audiobook Mastering page. The link is right under the link for the ACX check: wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/AudioBook_Mastering