Speaker 1: Hi morning folks, it's Dave Price here. I am going to make a little recording for you today about a project I'm working on at the moment which is I'm basically converting my audio, sorry I'm converting my e-book that I published a few years ago called How to Know Your Taxi Driver, I'm converting that into an audio book. Now I've already recorded myself speaking and what I'm doing at the moment is I'm now converting those raw speech files into tracks for the audio book and I'm going to show you what I do to convert my recordings into the tracks which you will hear for each chapter in the book. So anyway this is track 10 which I've already loaded up for you so you can actually have a quick listen to the very start of it. I'll just rewind the track there and it sounds a little bit like this. The environment, outside the taxi and within. Now that's back to me again. What this is going to be is I'm going to take all, in these little gaps that you can see here, these are the gaps between me speaking. These bumpy bits here is when I talk. So watch this, see. The environment, see. Now what I've realised is that I've got a bit of a noisy mouth. I'll show you what I mean by that. Watch this. Just after I say the environment. Did you hear that? That bit there is, I'm going to play it on loop and I hope it doesn't sound too rude but this is the sound of my mouth. That's my tongue moving. As I close my mouth at the end of a sentence, I close my mouth. Then I open my mouth and my tongue peels away from the roof of my mouth making this noise. Now you're never going to quite, you're never going to hear that because I'm going to get rid of it. So I've highlighted it and I'm going to do control L and it turns it into silence. So now if I just loop that little bit of sound again. No more spitty mouth. No more spitty mouth noises. Spitty mouth noises. Also what I'm doing is these bits here, now they do look silent but they're actually not because in the background of these areas you'll be able to hear stuff like the fan on the laptop, there's a bit of a hiss from the microphone itself, little things. At the time of recording this, my daughter's in the next room watching something on the television and if I was recording my audio now you'd probably be picking that up as well. So I'm going to avoid that. So anyway, I'm going to get rid of all these little gaps here. So what I'm going to do, I'm not going to destroy the gaps, I'm going to highlight this section which is a typical area of silence and I'm going to apply an effect called noise removal. Firstly it needs to know what noise sounds like so I'm going to go click on noise removal here, get noise profile and that will analyse this section here and work out what's in it and it will go through the whole track and anything that sounds like this will be removed. But firstly I've got to unselect this so now I'm going to say everything here I want to remove that bit that I just got the noise profile for. So I'm going to go effect, noise removal, I've already done get noise profile because I've told it. Now I'm going to show you over here, watch this line, it may go a little thinner. I might have already done this. So if it doesn't do anything it means I've already done it. Watch this bit here, that's definitely silent there, that's possibly silent but if it goes flat like this bit it's definitely worked. Here we go. Here we go, here we go, here we go. Go to the end of the file, watch that bit, it looks the same. In fact those little bumps have appeared which I don't recognise from before. Let me just have a quick listen. The environment outside the taxi and within. Oh there's another spitty mouth noise there, hang on. So I'm getting a bit obsessed with this, it's annoying me. Yeah, and within. Also my noises, my personal noises as it were include the sound of me breathing. I'll show you what breathing sounds like. Once again, don't get too excited if I loop this. Yeah, I'm getting a bit of me old Darth Vader on going on there. Get rid of that. So I have to listen to myself for the next. Call me weird. Call me weird, go on. Yes I know. Call me weird, but farting in my taxi. Oh, there's another spitty noise there. Sorry I'm interrupting you listening to the audio book. Audio, you'll have to buy it when it comes out. Yeah, spitty mouth noise. Okay, right, I'm going to get rid of that and I'm going to pause you just for a moment. I'm going to go through the rest of the file. I'm going to go through it and there's only about two minutes on this particular chapter so it shouldn't take me too long. I'm going to get rid of all the spitty mouth noises and the sounds of me breathing. So I'll have a silent mouth and I won't breathe. So basically I'll be dead. Okay, and I'll be back for you to pick up this video. Okay, welcome back. I've been through my file. I've got rid of all my spitty mouth noises and breathing and also I noticed when I was recording this particular track, in fact most of the tracks actually, there's a few places where I fluff the lines and rather than start again I just keep rolling and repeat myself. So there's some bits here where I've repeated myself so I found the good take and highlighted the bad bit and I just hit the delete key and this would disappear and this area would close up to take its place. So I was just basically snipping bits of rubbish out of my audio. So now I've got a nice clean recording. Or the snow-covered plains of Alaska. I should have done that in my Morgan Freeman book. I should have done that in my Morgan Freeman voice for clarity. Anyway, no, I should have done that in my Morgan Freeman voice because I'm saying something like, or the snow-covered plains of Alaska. Or the snow-covered plains of Alaska. You see what I mean? It would have been better as George Foreman. Morgan Freeman, yeah. Can I say that again? The Morgan Freeman voice to say, or the snow-covered plains of Alaska. Or the snow-covered plains of Alaska. No, that doesn't sound right at all. Anyway, yeah, that's why I didn't do it. So anyway, so I've got rid of my spitty mouth noises and my breathing and now all I'm left with is me not doing Morgan Freeman impressions which I wish I had. I would have done it better. So now we've got the audio and I need to make sure that the levels are alright. So the first thing I do to this is I apply this little effect called Leveler and it will compress my vocals slightly. So I'm a bit, you can see I've gone a bit louder there. The peaks are a bit better than before. The environment. So I'm already louder. Now I'm going to do finally a last effect which is Normalize which is to make sure that I'm using the full area of the audio spectrum in terms of how loud it gets and how

Speaker 2: quiet it gets. So it's gone slightly louder again. The environment outside the taxi and within. So

Speaker 1: there you go. So that's my audio bits. Now I need to add some background music to it. So instead of the gaps there, we've always got a little bit of music going on in the background. Now there's no speech on this particular track as in I'm reenacting conversations. So what I did on those occasions was I would take a conversation between two people and I would copy my track with me speaking both parts and split them into three tracks. So I would have the center vocal for my commentary. This first track would become the left track for the left speaker and the other track would become the right track for the right speaker and I would go through the track editing the conversation I'm having with myself. So that one voice would end up in the left speaker, one voice would end up in the right speaker and where appropriate I would also close up some of the gaps in the audio so there would be no time for me to breathe between doing the different voices. So it gives the illusion that there's two people speaking. Anyway, if you ever like listen to the audio book at some stage, you'll hear an example of that in the conversation about the passenger that I had in the taxi that was questioning why the fare was how much it was, etc. So anyway, so I'm here talking about how I'm editing this audio, so making it into an audio book, not the actual audio book itself. So I'll stop going on about that now. So we've got here, it's currently a stereo track. I don't need it to be stereo because there's only one voice being recorded. So I'm going to take this track, split the stereo track to two tracks and get rid of one. So now we've got a mono track which is obviously the environment just in one speaker. That's unusual. I wasn't expecting that at all. Hang on a minute. That shouldn't be in that channel. Mono. There we go. Yeah, there we go. The environment in both speakers, please. The environment. Yeah, there is. So now I'm going to import an audio track. And this audio track is a piece of background music made by a guy whose name is Jason something. I can't remember. But his website is audionautix.com and he has got an amazing website that's full of audio background music tracks. Yeah, so that's what that's for. And this particular track I've used, I'm alternating between Cool Ride and Inner Journey for each alternate track. So you can definitely get a feel that you're listening to each chapter that comes along. We'll have a different music track even if it's alternating between the two. It's a nice way to differentiate the two chapters. And when music fades out at the end and fades in with a new piece of music, you know that you're on the next chapter. That's why I'm using the two different tracks. There's a third track there which I'm not sure why I've selected it. But there's a third track which I've elected not to use. So anyway, so this particular track, it's the turn of Cool Ride. So I'm going to open that track up and it's going to import it into the track that we're currently listening to. So there's Cool Ride just there. If I play the track, it's awfully loud. So I'm going to take this one down to start with using the volume. I've worked out that it's approximately 25. 25, 24, 25. There you go. So now we pull the level of the track back. The environment outside the taxi and within. But also what I've done is I've done something called auto-duck which by that I mean when I'm speaking, it drops the level of the music even further still. At the moment, it sounds like this. The environment. But afterwards, the music will actually, where I'm speaking, the music will drop away completely during those times. Anyway, there is one thing I've actually forgotten to do which I need to do first is I'm going to highlight this track and I'm going to take out the gaps, truncate silence. That means if you notice the length of this track is currently 1 minute 57.36 seconds. That's me speaking for that amount of time. But I'm looking for areas in this audio where there's nothing happening at all that are too long and I'm going to take them out. So I've highlighted it. It's currently 1 minute 57 seconds. Hopefully, there won't be many gaps because I'm pretty good at keeping myself going when I'm talking, when I'm recording myself. So I'm truncating the silence. Minimum silence duration is 1 second. Maximum silence duration is 4 milliseconds. So that's 4 seconds. Threshold for silence is 20 decibels. So that should take it right down to the core. So I'm going to take that out now. Watch. 1 minute 50 seconds should go down to, yeah, 1 minute 54. So we've lost... Hello, Elsie. We've lost... My daughter's next to me. You may or may not be able to hear her. So we've taken it down to 1 minute 54. We've lost 1 minute 489. Yeah, we lost about a couple of seconds of silence there. So that'll be nice to get rid of. And what I also need to do is make sure that my speech starts approximately 5 seconds after the track starts because I need 5 seconds of audio and then my voice will come in. So I'm going to cut it just there. I'm going to go up to about... Looking at the bottom of the screen there. 5 minutes 68. Yeah, about there. And paste my voice in. Now, I notice I've actually messed up there because if I go back to the start of here, there's a bit there where I'm actually not doing anything at all. I'm just going to get rid of that. Yeah, so that's bang on 5 seconds now. So let's pull it in and see if you can hear what I've done so far. So you see, it gives a chance for the track, the music background to build and then voice comes in. But I'm going to now do auto-duck which means that the sound level on the music track will lower whenever I'm speaking. And what we do is we take this track and we drag it to the top first. And we say we're going to work on this track, the music track. We're going to do effect auto-duck and it needs the track below it, physically just below it, in order to know what it's actually meant to be ducking it based upon. Okay, you'll see what I mean in a second. Just watch the volume levels on this music here. Yeah. So the music will be at full volume where it's silent on this track below and then when my speech comes in, it will duck the audio. In other words, silence the audio or lower the volume of the audio while I'm speaking. So watch this now. Watch just there, just here. That'll be loud, that'll be quiet. Just processing now. Nearly there. And finally it's going to go all the way to the end of the music track and discover that there's nothing to duck because I only rattle on talking for about two minutes on this particular track. So yeah, we're nearly there. There you go. So now you've got loud music, quiet music. If I drag along here, you'll see that where I actually stop to breathe or pause between speech, the music goes louder there. So you have a bit of a gap there. So it turns the music back up for just a second and then fades it back down again when I talk, fades it back up again when I stop talking. See, I've got little gaps there, audio duck. So I'll actually just play you the track and see if you can hear what I'm talking about. So just watch the audio there. Now it starts to speak. The environment outside the taxi and within. Call me weird, but farting in my taxi, then claiming it to be a really good advert for the quality of the food at your dad's pub is frankly a bit odd. I won't be eating at the county hotel anytime soon anyway. There you go. So that's how I do it. So that's the track now processed. So that's now turned me rattling on to myself, recording myself reading an audio book at three in the morning into something which is approaching a half decent audio book version of that same thing. So yeah, I'm Dave Price. Thank you for listening. Oh, sorry. Before I sign off, I need to fade out the end of the music. So there you go. That's where the end of it is. So we take approximately, so we're on one minute 58 and we have approximately five seconds of audio. So that will take us to two minutes and 53 seconds. Sorry, two minutes and three seconds. That's it. One, two, two minutes and three seconds. It's a nice place there. So I'll now take that audio, zoom out so we can see it all. Two minutes and three and highlight it all the way to the end. There you go. So that's all the audio to the end. Delete it and then go back to one minute 58 approximately. Highlight that to the end of there and effect fade out. So that now fades out the end of the track. So watch this. And I'm out.