Speaker 1: Hey guys welcome back thank you very much for joining me today I'm bringing you a video going over ACX requirements and how to meet them as quickly and simply as possible so there's nothing in here about mastering or making your audiobook sound awesome I will do that in another video so make sure you're subscribed for that but today is just about making ACX requirements which are industry standard essentially as simple and easy as possible and we'll go through and we'll make this clip ACX standards. This sounds a bit goofy, take a listen.

Speaker 2: Welcome to my audio book, written by so-and-so and rated by me.

Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, it sounds ridiculous but the reason for that is I wanted an example that had loud bits and quiet bits and that's what I got. Let's take a look at the requirements quickly. Be consistent in overall sound and formatting. Nice and easy, just do everything the same throughout your book and you're good. Opening and closing credit files, so you need a file at the beginning that says this is the title of the book, it's written by so-and-so, and narrated by so-and-so. And then you do the same file for the closing credits, but you just say thank you very much for listening, this was the title of the book, written by so-and-so, and narrated by me. Nice and easy, right? Needs to be comprised of all mono or all stereo files. So your audiobook can be either mono or it can be stereo. Now, 99% of the time, it doesn't matter which, so go for mono because it's smaller. A lot of the time with audio books, unless you have actual stereo effects, which the majority of the time you don't, unless you have a lot of sound design, in which case you're not gonna be watching this video, go for mono, because stereo is just double the file size for no reason. Retail sample. So you need a section of the book that's between one and five minutes long to use as the retail sample of your book. Pick a section that is a good representation of your book so that listeners can listen to it to get an idea what your book's about. You can use, for example, two two-and-a-half-minute sections and edit them together if you have different sections of your book that sound different. That's absolutely fine. It just needs to be between one and five minutes and be a honest representation of what the rest of the audio book's like. The next thing you need to worry about is the export settings, which is this bit. Sorry, just this bit at the end. So it needs to be 192 kbps, which is kilobits per second, needs to be MP3 format, and it needs to be constant bit rate, or CBR. And it needs to be 44.1 kilohertz sample rate. This is super easy to take care of, depending on what software you're using. You should be recording as WAV at 44.1 kHz or higher. So when you come to export your audiobook when you've finished editing, you export it to MP3 and you just make sure you have these settings set in your Save As or Export window. But as a good rule of thumb when you're making audiobooks or recording any audio, video, record all of your raw session files as WAV, then make a copy and do all your edits as WAV, and then export after that when you've finished and you're ready to go. So you should have the original WAVs that are unadulterated, the WAVs that you are actually working on, and then when you finish working on them and you're happy with them, you then export that to mp3, and you just make sure that your mp3 is set to this. So you can't have files that are longer than 120 minutes long. Nice and easy, everyone can figure that one out for themselves. Only one chapter or section per file. Again, nice and easy. If you need to get under 120 minutes, you just do chapter one, part one, chapter one, part two, et cetera. At the beginning of the file, you need the section chapter, or the heading, read out loud. That is literally just a case of you read chapter one. Okay, so this is chapter one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or some books don't have chapters, they have title names or section names. So you just read out introduction and then read your content, as simple as that. This here, measure between negative 23 and negative 18 RMS and have negative three DB peak values and a maximum of 60 DB noise floor. this is the bit that normally catches people out but don't be intimidated it's actually really really easy right so I did a video the other day on just this subject in depth of exactly how it works so if you want the in-depth deep dive into how it works I will link it here or here wherever it goes and I'll drop a link in the description you can go check that out I'm going to brush over it here just to make it super simple and easy so RMS needs to be between 23 and 18 negative 23 and 18 peak values needs to be negative 3 DB or lower noise floor needs to be negative 60 DB so let's go backwards let's start with noise floor needs to be negative 60 DB so in our clip this is our noise floor here we can scan this section and our noise floor is negative 66.29 dBs. So that's the peak volume of this quiet section here. If your noise floor is too high you need to correct that ideally at the recording stage. Make sure you're recording in a quiet environment with at least some half decent gear. You can use noise reduction processes in your DAW to reduce that a little bit, and you can use very mild expansion to just help decrease that a little bit if you need to. Do not, for the love of God and all that is holy, gate the audio in your audiobook. If you do, I will hide under your bed and haunt you. I'll do a video on why you shouldn't be gating audio for audiobooks, and I will link that at some point when I've done it or subscribe so you get notified when I do that video. But just for the minute, take the rule of thumb, do not gate your audio. Expand the two to one at most, but I'll do a more in-depth thing for that later. So at the minute, our noise floor is okay, right? The next thing we need to deal with is peak values, need to be negative three. Now, if we come back to our project here and we scan the whole file, our peak amplitude is negative 2.09 that's too loud this is really easy to fix you turn it down and then scan now our peak amplitude is minus 3.29 that's quieter than minus 3 because it's indexed from 0 minus numbers that's it perfectly fixed right the other way of doing this is to you to is to use a process called normalization. Normalization just turns up or down the entire track. So if we go into effects, amplitude and compression, normalize process, normalize to its decibel value and I would recommend normalizing to negative 3.1 DB rather than 3 just to give you a little bit of headroom and And the reason I say that is because sometimes different softwares measure things a little bit differently. So in one software it might measure negative 3.1, and in another it might measure negative 3, which is fine. But if you've done it to negative 3, and then in that other software it measures as 2.9... Problem. So just go 3.1, just give yourself a little bit of room for error, and then it's fine. So we'll apply that. Boom. Now we've got our peaks in line. but the problem now if we scan our whole file our rms is out so we've got that checked we've got that checked we just need to make sure we don't undo the peak values now we need to get the rms in but our rms is negative 24 it needs to be 23 or higher so this is too quiet How do we do that? So the easiest way of doing this is to compress. Get the most simple compressor you can and set up a ratio of say 2 to 1 after you've normalized your audio and set your threshold to 20. Oh my god come on. Okay ignore all the other settings on your compressor you don't need to worry about them don't worry about what these do don't worry about how it works just do that right if you're unsure two to one ratio threshold negative 20 okay we'll apply this to our audio look what happened is it's cut it down right now after you've done this right all of this is going to be completely off right minus 11 db for peak amplitude minus 28 for rms it's made it worse okay you just need to after you've compressed normalize your audio backup to negative 3.1 db there we go and we'll rescan the whole thing and we've got negative 3.1 again perfect and our rms now is higher it's not minus 23 it's minus 20 so that's perfect right now the only other thing we have to do is make sure and it's where is it that's it okay it's in there somewhere you need to make sure that the beginning of the file has between 0.5 and 1 second of room tone and the end of the file has between 1 and 5 seconds of room tone so here we've got about 0.75 seconds of room tone which is absolutely perfect it's spot-on and at the end if we measure this I've got 1.1 second of room tone which is a little bit you know let's pretend it was a little bit less than that you know let's say we've got that and now we've only got 0.9 of a second that's not enough well that's easy we just copy our room tone and then paste it 1.6 seconds boom all right now you need to do is export your project because we should be working in a WAV and then when we export it we just make sure that we've got mp3 and then we make sure that we have uh 44.1 kilohertz which is 44,100 and then we make sure that everything is mono unless a specific reason we have um bit depth just go 24 and then you just need to make sure that you're set to constant bitrate. This menu will look a bit different depending on what software you're using, but it's all basically the same. Just make sure the numbers match up to what they are. I'll do a video at some point explaining what they are, but if you're just looking to get your project fixed and sorted and out, boom, that's it. That's all you need to know if you do your files like that you should be pretty much good to go if you have any questions drop me a comment I'll do my best to answer and help out make sure you subscribe because I want to do videos explaining all of these subjects and what they are so if you want to learn about these things follow along um thank you very much for watching I'll see you in the next video