Speaker 1: Well hey there, I'm Jay. Welcome to my booth. There are a ton of recording softwares out there, so which one is the best for you and the best generally for voiceover artists working out of their home studios? Today I'm gonna walk you through my top choices both in the free category, which are great for folks starting out and well into your career, and then some more robust options that both I use here in my studio every day and some other softwares that I'm not as familiar with myself but are incredibly popular in voiceover. And then at the end of the video I'll tell you which one's the best as far as I'm concerned. So to start off with, what do you really need from a voiceover software? All you need to do is record, stop, edit out your mistakes, and be able to render out the audio in a couple different file formats. Most often that's mp3 and WAV, and then there's different file specs within those that we won't get into here. Needless to say, all the softwares here today will cover you as a voiceover artist and are great options. The first one we'll take a look at is Audacity. I've got it open here and it's a super simple to use, super simple to learn software that again is free, so it's wonderful if you're just starting out. Recording into it, I can't record right now unfortunately because I'm recording into another software, but if you've got some audio in here, you record, it gives you this beautiful monitor up at the top. So if your interface doesn't have decibel levels, this gives you a really accurate reading of your peak values, which is really helpful to have in a lot of recording sessions. And then as far as applying effects and like streaming, streamlining your workflow, optimizing, becoming more and more efficient as you work, you can get really quick with this, but it doesn't have as many tools as some of the paid softwares in terms of customizability and your workflow optimization. Case in point, what you'll probably run into most is when you want to apply an effect. We go up here and there's all these wonderful effects available to you. I can't apply any right now because I don't have audio selected, but you have to apply each effect individually every single time you want to do it, which in my opinion is a double-edged sword, both a good thing and a bad thing. On the bad side, it just takes up some time and you have to do it every single time you interact with it. On the upside of that, when you're just starting out and learning more about audio engineering, the concepts behind it, how you can use it to help your audio sound better, interacting with each one of those effects every time not only reinforces what you're actually doing, so you're not just applying some preset somebody made for you without really knowing what's happening, but you're actually learning about it and you're also giving each piece of audio a bespoke, tailored treatment for every audition, every job, which while you're not gonna have to adjust settings dramatically, that little tweaking can just, it makes a difference and I think ultimately adds a little bit of extra value to you as a talent, if that's something you're inclined to. The second software that I recommend, again, free, really simple to use, really simple to learn and it comes pre-installed on all Macs, it's GarageBand. Now GarageBand is mainly intended to be used with music or that's its initial design concept, so you'll notice at the top here we've got beats, bars, tempo, a key, gives you a metronome and a count-in, so you have to sort of customize it a bit to be voiceover friendly, which doesn't take a whole lot of effort and you can save your presets here in GarageBand to make it pop open like this every single time. The main difference between GarageBand and Audacity, they're both pretty comparable in a lot of ways, but the effect applications, the post-processing, it's got a really nice interface down here at the bottom, so you can apply EQ, compression and a little bit of noise gating if that's something you're interested in trying out with restraint, and GarageBand just makes it much more streamlined than Audacity does in my limited use of it. So if you're on a Mac, give GarageBand a try, it's definitely worth looking into and learning the ropes with. Additionally, GarageBand has basically the same foundation as Apple's more advanced and fully featured software, Logic, so if you do decide to upgrade, starting off with GarageBand and then trying Logic's trial to see if you want more features, that's a good way to go as well I think. So again, GarageBand, wonderful for beginners and it's a great place to start and use well into your career. The last couple free softwares that I'd recommend, when you buy your audio interface, it usually comes with either trial softwares of big professional names like Pro Tools, Ableton, Cubase, which are big expensive softwares that are used on a larger scale, and each one of those has a sort of introductory version, which generally is free and is just really stripped down in terms of the features that it offers. Well, the main software, the big ones that you got to pay for, are way over featured for what you're gonna need for voiceover. So the free intro versions, Pro Tools Intro, Ableton Live Lite, that maybe come with your audio interface are a great place to start and just see how different software ecosystems feel, because each software has sort of a different rhythm to it, a different styling of how you interact with the audio you're recording. So one might fit you better than the other and it's worth trying them out if you're curious. Now let's jump into the software that I use every day and these are my two daily drivers. The first one I've got open here, it's what I'm currently recording into, is Adobe Audition. It's a really, really fully featured software. It can handle any job you would possibly get and throw at it. And the main reasons why I really enjoy it beyond the amount of features that it has, is simply this editing window right here. It gives you so much information when you're editing your auditions, your projects, that it really speeds up your workflow and makes everything really clear for you. It's a great way to visualize sound and I love talking about it and nerding out about this window in particular. So indulge me and I'll break it down. If you aren't interested and you just want to hear about the software's, feel free to skip ahead a few seconds. So this top window is your waveform view. It's the same view that you'll see in any other recording software and it shows your recording, the audio, relative in time. So we've got the beginning of your recording moving through and now I'm at about eight minutes in terms of this recording. And the peaks, the vertical levels, are how loud your recording is. So if we look over here on the right side, we can see the different decibels that I'm hitting here. So this peak is about, this peak here is the tallest, so it's the loudest. It's about minus 4 dB. And then this section where I stopped talking for a bit to figure something out is really quiet because I'm not talking into the microphone and so there's no peaks there. It's just a straight line moving across. By contrast, this lower window is what's called a spectral view and it's the same deal. Time is going across this way. This is the beginning of the recording. This is the end of the recording as I'm moving through it. But the vertical axis, the bottom to the top here, is frequency, the frequency of sound. So a hundred Hertz down here at the bottom and 20k or 20,000 Hertz at the top. And the volume, the loudness of each sound, is represented by color. So the brighter it is, the louder. The darker it is, the quieter. So you can see here represented where the most information from my voice is coming through, which is just kind of cool. My voice rests between 600 Hertz and a hundred Hertz mainly, which is typical for most male presenting voices. There's lots of information moving up in the frequency, but the bulk of it is just down here. And the reason why these two views are really helpful is it just lets you visualize sound and get into editing. So this gap in space here, I can easily see it and go in and edit it. Anyway, thanks for indulging me on that. So Adobe Audition, as a software, I highly recommend it. It's incredibly popular among voiceover artists. I've been using it for about two years, full time now, and I'm still learning stuff about it every day. It's really deep and detailed and lets you do a ton of stuff, and it's hyper customizable to optimize your workflow in a lot of ways. You can save tons of different presets and all that jazz. It's about 30 bucks a month, a subscription service, and if you buy the entire Adobe Creative Suite, it's about 60 bucks a month after taxes, depending on where you are. And I can't recommend it enough. So then the other software that I use all the time is Reaper. And Reaper was my first ever recording software, and I highly recommend it. Just like Adobe Audition, it's incredibly versatile, incredibly customizable. It's an open-source software, so there's a big community always generating new stuff for it. I edit all of my long-form projects, most of my multi-track sessions, so if I've got a bunch of different audio tracks that I have to jam together, like music, a video, etc., I can edit it all together here, and you can change anything, literally anything, down to the code within the program to suit your needs. So it's really, really useful. And on top of all of that, it only costs 65 bucks for a lifetime license, until you make over $20,000 a year using it, at which point the folks developing the program ask you to pay a $225 lifetime license fee, at least as of the recording of this video, which is, as far as I know, unbeatable for the amount of tools you get when you work with Reaper. And I get updates from the developers for this software every couple of weeks, if not more frequently, that really help and improve the user's quality of life. So a lot of love goes into this program on the back end. It just, it deserves it. It's a really, really great program, and I highly recommend this one as well. So those are the two programs that I use here in my studio most frequently every day, and I highly recommend both of them. A few other softwares that folks recommend to me or have used in, my friends and colleagues use in their daily workflows, Twisted Wave is probably one of the next most popular that I hear. It's right now only available on Mac, but as you see here, they're working on a Windows version that's in beta. And as far as I know, it's incredibly flexible and comes with a trial, so it's definitely worth a shot if you're looking at it. And the full license is only 100 bucks, 99 bucks to be precise. So it's a good mid-range that's not a subscription-based and it's not hundreds of dollars. So I'd say this is a good, it rests well between the free programs, which are pretty simple relative to the fully featured expensive programs, which are not only more money, but have a steeper learning curve. I think Twisted Wave rests neatly in that curve on the way up there. Other programs that folks use, Pro Tools is the industry standard for all production companies. It's used in movies, film and TV, radio, podcasts, professional production companies use it all the time. Now for home studio voiceover artists, Pro Tools is probably just straight-up overkill. You don't need it, it's too expensive and it has way more tools than you'll ever need as a home studio voiceover talent. Again, you just need to record, stop, edit, and if you want to learn about audio engineering, go into it. I would say if you're the kind of person who sees a future or is interested in audio engineering, the back side, the sound side of things, you're gonna need to know how to use Pro Tools if you want to work professionally as an audio engineer. So if that interests you and you're also a voice talent, give it a shot because you will need to learn it at some point. Just if you're a solely a recording talent, you probably don't need to go there. And as I mentioned, there's Ableton Live Lite and Cubase, both of which are also incredibly popular, but not so much as voiceover. Those tend to be more production side of things for music, film, TV, etc. So with all that said, which one of these softwares is the capital B best for voiceover artists? To be honest, the best software for you and really anyone is gonna be the one that you're most comfortable with, in my opinion. The reason being, at the end of the day, you're a performer and if you're not comfortable using the software that is recording you and it's getting in the way of your performance, it's causing your mental energy to be used there, if it's causing you stress, it's just not worth it. Now however, I do think that spending the time, if you are so inclined, to learn a little bit about audio engineering and investing more time and energy picking up those concepts, it does in my experience, make you more marketable and valuable as a voiceover talent. If you can handle, hey, we'd like this file normalized to minus three decibels, we'd like the RMS value, we need this thing cut off here, we need this file rendered at this point. Having the skills to do all that, because it does come up, it just makes you valuable and rehireable as a voice talent. Do you need it? No, that's not your job at the end of the day, it's just adding value to you as a talent. So with all that said, let me know if one of these works best for you. If you have any questions about these specifically or anything else voiceover related, drop me a line here on YouTube, you can reach out to me on my website. Additionally, some folks have asked me about coaching opportunities. If you're interested in one-on-one coaching sessions, I'm in the process of setting that up, so check that out on my website if you're so inclined. Otherwise, I'll catch you in the next one, and until then, be well. Toodles.