How to Change RMS for AUDIOBOOKS on ACX

hi hello hope you're in fine voice now if you're narrating an audio book and uh particularly for ACX which is the audible platform you'll be going through the motions of doing your recording and editing debriefing at times leaving some breaths in perhaps and then you might reach a stumbling block and they will suddenly ACX will suddenly say oh oh no your RMS levels need to be between -23 and -18 DB which all sounds terribly scary and all it means really is RMS stands for root mean Square by the way but what they're saying is we don't want it to be too loud and we don't want your recording to be too soft it's got to be just right the Goldilocks zone if you like that's what they're aiming for which you can understand because listeners don't want to be turning up cranking up the volume and then turning it back down again they want to sort of Fairly even consistent volume to listen to so RMS levels are very important and certainly important to ACX now it's a bit a bit of a scary thing when you you see that so let's use audacity to see how we can analyze the RMS levels and actually change them to meet the ACX requirements so here's my story let's play it just to see what it's like one fine evening in the August of the year 1666 Martin leak aged 14 and a few months there it is but let's check what the RMS levels are now if you go to analyze in audacity so you go to the toolbar analyze and then measure RMS it will say in this case minus 32.3341 DB and that is actually too quiet so what I want to do is make it a bit louder and get within those parameters of -23 to -18 DB so I want to make it louder and what I do is I go to effect and then volume and compression and loudness normalization if I look there and you see I've got normalize and RMS comes up you might have another option which is perceived loudness we don't want that we want the RMS level and it's coming up as a default kind of minus 23 which would be absolutely fine because it fits within that those uh those required parameters and if I just apply it minus 23 you'll see immediately the waveforms got bigger and that means it's louder and if I just go back again so I've got a volume and compression loudness normalization RMS let's try the minus 18 which was kind of the other the other end of the scale their required scale apply don't forget to put the minus apply and it's even louder look so that should work perfectly I am using audacity 3.2 there if you've got a different version there may be some slight variation in in how you do it and there are plugins that you can use but this is all built in to audacity 3.2 and it's a great way of taking that pressure off you so don't be Bamboozled by the the RMS levels it's not as scary as you might think okay thanks very much for watching today look after your voice and see you next time foreign [Music]

Channel: Gary Terzza VoiceOver Coach

Views: 7,335

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Id: dG6sjUJzkBM

Length: 4min 24sec (264 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022