Speaker 1: Welcome to Sound Speeds, and in this episode, we're going to be specifically talking about voiceover narration for audiobooks. But before we even get into that, let's talk about technical standards that every company that's going to distribute audiobooks has. Now, if you have a microphone around your house, and it's a fairly cheap one, and you know it's pretty cheap if it's not a USB microphone, and it has the cable attached to it, and it plugs straight into your computer or plugs straight into whatever else, that's probably a fairly cheap one. The build quality of it's going to be plastic, it's going to pull in, it's going to most likely be an omnidirectional microphone, it's going to pull in every sound around the entire room, and you don't want to use something like that, because it's just going to pull in too much. You want to try to have a microphone, first of all, that's a good quality microphone. Now, you don't need to spend a small fortune to get yourself going in an audiobook career. And the reason I'm starting with this microphone talk, and the next thing we're going into is the way you record it, but the reason we're starting there is because that actually builds up to the technical standards and requirements that companies like iTunes and Audible, these companies have technical standards, and your microphones are a big part of that. Now, if you want to grab something fairly inexpensive, there is this one, which is the poor man's Neumann U87, this is called the M-Audio Nova. It's actually a discontinued microphone, you can pick them up fairly cheap, somewhere between the $60 and $80 mark, sometimes up to $100. They were not discontinued very long ago. Another one, if you want to step up a little bit more, you can get something, the CAD E100 is one of my favorite microphones right now. And the richness that comes out of this microphone, it's a super cardioid pattern, and it just picks up beautifully. It sounds awesome. The things you want to avoid are microphones that are built into things like gaming headsets. You don't want to use one of these because this little bitty microphone in here is not going to pick up a whole lot, and it's not going to sound good with whatever you get. You also want to make sure you are putting your microphones into a shock mount. Now, what do I mean by a shock mount? It is a suspension of some sort that holds your microphone, and this one here is a universal, this is by Rycote, it's a USM kit, as they call it, and it's designed for you to stick microphones directly in, and then you just twist it, and it'll grab hold of a square, rectangle, or round microphone, and it'll hold onto it and kind of use these little shock-absorbent things here, which are actually plastic bows that they do sell, which is awesome. This technology is just plain amazing. You're going to hear me talk about these quite a bit, but this is a shock-absorbent system here, and I'm sure you've probably seen those suspensions that usually come with other microphones that have more of a basket look, and they have rubber bands and stuff that kind of hold it up. You also would most likely want to get a pop filter. This is the one that actually goes with the Rycote shock mount I just got through showing here, and between these, you want to make sure that you have these so that that way you record a good-quality audio track, and it all starts at the source. Your voice has got to be picked up by a high-quality microphone, and if it pops too much, then it's not going to be good, and if it picks up all the rattle of the room, the air conditioning system, first of all, should be turned off, but any rumbles, someone comes in through the garage door, something like that, it rattles the whole house, you want to make sure that's eliminated. The best way to do it is through a suspension of some sort. Now, that does, right there between those two, the USM kit by Rycote, if you go that route, you don't have to. You can get any other shock mount you want. You can even make fairly decent ones that will at least get you by for a bit. Now, those right there, the shock mount itself, that one is about $100. The M-Audio Nova is $60 to $80, and the Caddy $100 is around $150 to $200 on eBay right now, but if you don't have that money to spend, you can combine your microphone with a recorder and get something like a Zoom H4n or a Tascam DR-40. You know these little recorders. You have the microphones on the end, and it's a one self-contained system for $100, $150. If you find them on a good deal, you can get them for cheaper, but that is the very bare bones basic I would suggest ever considering for an audio book, and many people will tell me I'm crazy for even considering that lower standard, but I will tell you, I know people that have produced very good quality audio books that adhere to the technical standards required by Audible, for example, in order to make sure their audio book is produced. It is possible. I've seen it done. I've even helped to come up with technical standards to make them work for Audible, so before we even get into anything else, let's talk about the recorder. You've got to make sure the recorder also matches your microphone. If you record on a piece of garbage recorder, it doesn't matter what microphone you have, it's going to sound terrible, and that's not allowable. You can't do that. You've got to have a good quality recording. Imagine this. You have yourself crystal clear spring water, and you pour it into a dirty cup. That dirty cup is going to make that taste like garbage. The same kind of thing happens in reverse. Let's say you start off with, in this case, it's going to be dirty water, which is equivalent of not having a very good quality microphone. You pour it into a crystal clear pitcher that just came out of the dishwasher. It's still going to be dirty water. You've got to have a good quality microphone and a good quality recorder in order to produce good quality audio books. Now, in order to record the signal from the microphone itself, you could do something like get a standalone audio recorder like a Zoom H4n or a Tascam DR-40, or you can get something like this here. This is a very, very inexpensive audio interface that goes into your computer via a USB. It's as simple as plugging that USB in there, plugging in your XL microphone right there, and the XL microphone will just go and interface directly in, and you can record straight into your computer using a program like the program we'll discuss later, Audacity. It's very important to maintain proper technical standards to make sure that your listeners are having a good audio book listening experience. The reason why companies like Audible put into effect things like RMS level, which is an average audio level, is because how many times have you listened to something on the television and all of a sudden a commercial comes on, it gets really loud, you have to turn it down, and then all of a sudden the commercial ends and your television shows back on, you have to turn the level back up. The reason why they have certain technical standards is to eliminate that kind of stuff. That way, it's mindless. You can listen to your audio book and it's just a great experience. They don't want to make sure that it sounds like garbage for any reason, whether it's the quality of the microphone, the quality of the voice that's doing it, or the actual listening experience itself. For example, if there's too much background noise, it's going to be distracting. You can't have a dog barking next door when you're recording and then submit that and expect them to accept it because then anybody who's listening to the audio book is going to be distracted by that dog barking. Back on May 12, 2011, Audible created ACX, which stands for the Audiobook Creation Exchange. This allows authors who have a book that they would like to have an audio book created for to be matched up with a voiceover artist that is maybe looking for some experience. This may be a place for you to start if you have not done any audio books or any kind of vocal narration. Now, here's how it works in a nutshell. I'm an author, let's say. I produce a book and it's published and it's out there. I'm going to want somebody to make an audio book for it so that way they can listen to my book, maybe in a car or something. But I don't have thousands of dollars to get it professionally produced. What can I do? This is where voiceover artists enter the picture. They can scroll down through ACX, see what books are available, do their own research, and accept the project if they'd like to. It's approximate number of words, approximate number of hours in delivery, but you've got to keep in mind a few things. I'm not going to go into all of those. I will actually say that if you want to get a great idea of what ACX is and how it works, go to the Booth Junkie channel and listen to Mike Delgado tell you all about it. He's even done a few. The link is down there in the description. I'm sidestepping. Let's talk about the actual ACX process itself. If you are going to be a voiceover artist for an ACX project, you're going to want to do a little bit of research and figure out what the book is and how much money you could potentially get from the sales. Most likely, if you're not being paid up front and you don't have to audition for a role, it's not going to be very big. Go ahead and get the idea of making $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 on this audio book. Get that out of your mind. It's most likely not going to happen from that audio book that you're going to get on ACX. Maintaining technical standards is not as simple as just recording good quality audio and a good quality microphone. It is actually maintaining certain standards, but luckily, there are tools that you can get that are free that will help you produce them. One of them is Audacity. Audacity is an open source software that basically allows you to do some pretty awesome audio effects, including dropping the noise floor, compressing your audio, and doing things like adjusting the equalization. All of that and more, and I highly recommend getting it. It's very, very simple to get Audacity. All you need to do is go to Google, do a search for Audacity or Audacity download or something of the like. It will take you right to the Audacity website. You click it, download it, and it is yours. You don't have to register. You don't have to do anything. It is absolutely free to use. Now, I'm not going to get into editing in this particular video. However, I will tell you there are many videos out there on YouTube, and all it is is a click away to teach you how to use Audacity. What I will do is talk about the technical standards and how to verify them for free as well. Inside of Audible, you have plugins that you can use. One of the plugins that is not installed by default is called ACX Check. ACX Check is a plugin written by Will McCown specifically dedicated to verifying the standards of ACX within Audacity. Those technical specifications you can look at on Audacity's website. They do have certain requirements regarding noise floor, in addition to things like segments and how they need to be broken up, how it needs to have an intro, how it needs to have an outro. We're specifically going to be talking in this video about the technical specifications. Those are the file itself needs to be 192 kilobits per second. It needs to be a constant bit rate file, CBR, of 44.1 kilohertz. It needs to be an MP3 format. Aside from that, you need to have an RMS of negative 23 to negative 18 decibels. RMS basically stands for root mean square. That basically is the average of constant varying signal like audio levels. Let's just say that the levels are very quiet here. The levels are very loud here. You want to make sure that they are squashed down. You want to compress that. I'm not going to get into that a whole lot in this video, but there are easily tutorials online that you can see about that, but we will get into a little bit of it. Another one is you want to make sure that the peak decibel level does not exceed negative 3 dB. That's not very difficult. Then of course, you want to make sure you have a negative 60 dB noise floor. How in the world do you come up with that? I'll show you. Now in order to get the ACX Check plugin, all you need to do is go to Google and type in ACX Check plugin. Click search. Then you're going to look for a link that says Nyquist analyzing plugin. You're going to click on it. Then inside of that, you're going to see ACX Check. Click download. Download it to your computer. After it's downloaded, you're going to want to go into the computer hard drive where you installed the file, which is most likely going to be default program files x86. Then inside of that, look for Audacity. Inside of Audacity, look for the plugin folder. Then do a cut and paste and put that ACX Check .ny file into the plugins folder. That will basically load the plugin into Audacity. That's all you have to do. It's very simple. In order to actually use the ACX Check plugin, all you need to do is double click to highlight your entire file. Then click above, drop down, and click ACX Check. Now when you do that, it will tell you if it passes or fails. As you can see right here next to me, this particular file fails for a few different reasons. The first step is going to be to normalize your audio. That means raising whatever your peak volume level is up to zero dB. That's going to make it basically about as loud as it possibly can be without distorting. Now the first real process I recommend running involves lowering your noise floor as low as possible. The reason why is because if you start messing with equalization, you're going to change the way it sounds in your room. Especially if you do the first part of it at one equalization and the second part of it at another equalization, it's going to totally change everything. Do it first, get your noise floor completely removed, and you will not have any issues. Now how do you do this? You highlight an area of your file that is completely quiet. Well, not as quiet as the room is. That means that you take an area before the sound actually starts up. For example, if I'm quiet right now, you'll hear what my room sounds like. That right there, that quiet, is what you're going to want to highlight. You're going to create a noise profile of that, which is a couple of clicks away, and then go right back into it. I actually recommend being fairly aggressive with it and lowering the decibel level quite low because you're trying to get to negative 60 dB. Once you do that, you'll notice the background audio level gets very quiet. Now the next process I usually recommend doing involves dynamic range compression. What does that mean? It means that if you have a very quiet part of your sound and a very loud part of your sound, you want to try to get those evened out. The best way to do that is by compression. There is a compression tool built into Audacity. The reason why I say you want to do this next is because after you've eliminated your background noise, you want it to pretty well even out. That way it can adhere to that negative 23 to negative 18 dB that Audible requires for all the files submitted. In order to do this, you double-click and highlight your entire file. Then a couple of clicks will take you into this compression screen. I'm not going to go into all the different settings here. You can fiddle around with them, but I suggest being fairly aggressive with your decibels of reduction in order to get down to that negative 23 to negative 18 dB. Once those steps are done, you've done most of the hard work. The last step I usually have to do is going to be to actually set the peak level to no higher than negative 3 dB. That's a couple of clicks away too. As you can see, it lowers it right on down there. Now, if you run the ACX check, it's going to probably tell you you passed. Congrats. You've now created an audio book file that will adhere to the technical standards required by ACX. That does not mean that your file is going to be accepted just because it passes the ACX check here. You still do have to adhere to the other standards. The link for those standards is down in the description, as is the link to download ACX check plugin. Now, if you want to download Audacity or the ACX check plugin, the links are down there in the description. Well, I hope you found that to be some sound advice. Have a question you'd like answered or want to add something? Be sure to write it in the comment section down below. You can also make a suggestion for future topics of discussion. Again, comment section down below or you can email me at soundspeeds at yahoo.com. Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you won't miss out on future sound advice.