How to adjust RMS & Loudness in Adobe Audition for Voiceover and Audiobooks | Tips from a PRO VO

well hey there everybody Welcome to my booth I'm Jay and today I'm going to talk about root mean squared RMS and loudness specifically how to adjust it in Adobe Audition this was a question sent in by Robert theave uh if you've got questions like this send them my way and I'll get to them as I can let's Dive Right In so I've got Adobe Audition open here and I've got two samples of the same classic Winnie the Pooh sentence that I use in a lot of my recordings here the first one I used a sort of vocal measured even volume through the entire performance to give us sort of a nice even waveform and then the second one here I was a little bit less measured and controlled in my vocal performance so I had loud moments I had very quiet moments just to give a little bit more range so we can see the difference of RMS so there are a couple of things that you can do in Adobe Audition to give you an idea of where you're starting and where you need to go I just want to talk about a couple differences of how we measure loudness and volume levels in audio the first is RMS or root mean squared it's a mathematical thing that to be perfectly honest I don't feel comfortable articulating to you all just because I don't understand it as deeply as a true blue audio engineer might but to be very reductive about it it measures the loudness average of the whole audio track and that's across all frequencies just measuring straight average there is another measure called LS which sort of accounts for the variable frequencies in a recording as they are perceived by human beings so one way you can think of it is uh if you're standing next to a jackhammer or a low rumbling Trin versus a fire alarm you're your experience of the loudness of those two things is somewhat different and the fire alarm at least in my experience or sirens in here in New York City those can be perceived in my hearing as louder Just because they have different frequencies than the low Rumble of a subway train in terms of loudness so that's RMS versus loudness RMS doesn't care about frequency LS kind of does and then there is peak and true Peak the difference between those two is kind of subtle I only use peak in my uh recordings and that's just looking at the loudest Point wherever it is in your recording and that's the peak that is the peak of the audio so if I look at this second sample right here that's the peak of my recording so if we normalize to minus 3db we're taking the Peaks up to minus 3db uh so those are the differences between those those three sort of separate measuring techniques so in Adobe Audition there are a few different tools that help us figure out what the loudness is the first is the easiest way to do it is to go up to this carrot here click on it and there is mastering and Analysis as well as loudness both will help us figure stuff out we're just going to jump in straight to loudness because it's the most comprehensive so down here is the amplitude statistics window that's there naturally and I can click on piece of audio and click scan it'll take the whole thing scan the whole deal and give me loudness metrics it gives me my Peak amplitude my true Peak as well as my RMS and uh so in all that I get a sense of where I'm at now I can also highlight certain sections as I noted here in my sample I've got two sort of different things I can highlight this first one that has even Peaks scan selection and it spits out exactly what I'm working with for this section can do the same thing over here highlight and scan and that gives me what I'm working with now I can adjust things manually from here using effects plugins limiters compressors to even things out and raise the RMS or I can go up here to this window which is the match loudness and what the way I use this I drag whatever audio I want to adjust into that window and then I can match two different loudness settings these all vary in terms of what you're adjusting what your targets are and sort of different parameters these top three are standard loudness measures uh based off of different sort of broadcasting standards for example ex Le a audiobook is broadcast via different uh distribution platforms and those distribution platforms have regulations as to what the optimal loudness setting is there's also uh similar ones for film and TV you have to optimize the loudness of your sound to a specific regulation and those are dictated by places like the FCC and other institutions that regulate those sort of broadcasting environments same thing goes for radio streaming uh YouTube has recommended settings as well and so those top three allow you to do certain uh different things there if you're adjusting just RMS lucky for us there is total RMS right here uh and it gives you a Target loudness of RMS so if you need to hit a certain loudness you just plug that in and it'll pump it out uh so I drag my thing over I set it wherever I want and then I just click run and it'll bake that RMS into my whole audio after I've clicked run you'll notice that it spits out some statistics here for me where I can see exactly where everything landed after the fact now one word of caution if you're bumping your RMS using this you'll notice that my Peak values jumped pretty significantly if we undo that loud Ness uh and we look back over here at my Peaks my Peaks are atus 3.5 is and if I run it again they jump up to .1 DB minus .1 DB which is quite a significant 3db jump additionally if you're doing audiobooks and stuff like that Peak values here are not really going to uh they're not going to be up to up to the uh distribution standard so what I do for Audi books is I I go into this loudness thing now this is LS which is human perceived loudness so it'll be slightly different than RMS the good thing is we get to see exactly what RMS values we have up here so if you are doing an Audi book and you're mastering it in Adobe Audition this will be a really helpful thing to cross check so I'll undo that loudness and I found that a l ofus 21 to to - 20.5 are good for me and then the true Peak for audiobooks they don't want it to go above minus 3db so I just set it at minus 3 or if you want to be safe you can go minus 3.1 just to give yourself a little bit more headro the tolerance is just how much fluctuation from file to file from moment to moment it's willing to tolerate and otherwise it'll either boost it or compress it or limit it uh to rest within that tolerance I like it at a05 tolerance you can play around with it if you want um and then the look ahead and release that's just how fast the compression and limiting is working and how far and Advance it's going to uh account for things I found I don't really need to adjust it from the standard factory settings so we'll click run see what happens boom we've got an RMS ofus 21.5 which is only5 DB less than what we did with the RMS but the benefit of doing it with this setting is now our Peak values are within the audiobook standard of minus 3db which is helpful uh so there you go that's how to adjust RMS here in Adobe Audition if you have any questions about this either Robert theave or anyone else let me know and I'll elaborate further and if you like this stuff you find find it helpful and you think other folks might too it's very appreciated if you're willing to take the time to click the buttons helps other folks find us here and if you want to support me directly you can just buy me a coffee never necessary always appreciated but until the next one please be well and I'll see you there [Music] toodles

Channel: Jay Myers Voiceover

Views: 3,463

Keywords: VoiceOver, audiobook, audio, audioengineering, jay, jaymyers, jaymyersvoiceover, jmvo, acting

Id: FBQ328sX0w0

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2023