Speaker 1: In this video, we wanted to show the workflow and time difference between using Narrator and Audacity when it comes to the final production and having an audiobook ready for ACX or Findaway Voices. Here we are focusing on the final process and technical considerations, but the entire workflow of making your audiobook will be different in Narrator than in Audacity. The main difference we will be focusing on here is that all the steps in Audacity will have to be done for each chapter. That's because for almost all Audacity users making audiobooks, you will be making a new file for each chapter. This is because audiobooks are long and it's difficult to manage a 5 or 10 hour audio file. It's also because ACX actually wants you to give them your book in separate files and in most cases that will be the chapters. So it only makes sense to make it that way in Audacity. The same is not true in Narrator, where we make one session and do the final exporting one time. ACX or other hosting sites have technical requirements that they want for your final audio files. ACX requires your files to contain only one chapter or section per file with the section header read aloud, have a running time no longer than 120 minutes, have room tone at the beginning and end, and be free of extraneous sounds. Measure between negative 23 db and negative 18 db rms and have a negative 3 db peak value and a maximum of negative 60 db noise floor. Be a 192 kilobits per second or higher mp3 with a constant bitrate CBR at 44.1 kilohertz. Let's look at making it happen in Audacity and Narrator. For this example we'll be looking at a four chapter book. So

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Speaker 1: ACX requires you to have a certain amount of room tone before and after chapter headings, as well as the beginning and end of the book. What you would have to do without Narrator is to manually move around and edit those headings. Here it's done automatically. As you can see Narrator automates the timings for chapter headings. Make sure you have room tone at the beginning and end of the file, calibrates the noise floor, and makes sure that the rms level is correct for all of the chapters in one go. This means that you only have to do this one time for the entire book. When you export the file after running it through the ACX validator, the chapters that make up your book will automatically be exported by their file name. Thank you for watching. Please like and subscribe to the channel.