How to set the RMS for ACX in Adobe Audition

hey everybody welcome back to my channel i am angela i am a full-time voice-over artist and audiobook narrator and this channel is dedicated to those of you who are just getting started in this wonderful world of voice-over in the hopes that maybe you can glean some information and some techniques that i use to help you grow in your own business so today's video is regarding a question that i've received an awful lot this week and that is how to reach the appropriate rms levels for audiobooks in acx so what we're going to do today is i'm going to record a little bit of an audio book just as a sample and then i will walk through the steps and how to format it properly for acx's standards so let's get started all right so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go shift ctrl n to create a new file and i am going to read a section from the great gatsby for this sample so i'm just going to name my file gatsby demo and then i'm going to set my sample rate as 44 100 and my bit depth to 16. all right so let's all right so i'm going to start recording grab my handy dandy clicker in case i make mistakes cause i do oh you know what first i'm going to take a little sip of water here because hydration is key chapter one in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that i've been turning over in my mind ever since whenever you feel like criticizing anyone he told me just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had he didn't say anymore but we've always been but we've always been unusually communicative communic communicative but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way and i understood that he meant a great deal more than that and i understood that he meant a great deal more than that in consequence i'm inclined to reserve all judgments a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bows boars and also made me the victim of not a few veteran boars the abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person and so it and so it came about that inc and so it came about that in college i was unjustly accused of i was unjustly accused of being a politician because i was privy to the secret griefs of wild unknown men most of the confidences were unsought frequently i have feigned sleep preoccupation or a hostile levity when i realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope i am still a little afraid of missing something if i forget that as my father snobbishly suggested and i snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth okay so that's about three minutes but i made a lot of boo-boos because that happens so the first thing we're going to do is i am going to go to my effects rack and i have a preset for audiobook and i show you how to create presets in another video that i've done and i will link that card up above for you so it's easy to find so i'm going to click audio book and what is basically in my audiobook rack is ns1 mono which removes some of the background noise that is present in the file it will also remove some of or reduce rather some of the mouth clicks that you normally get while you're talking uh deplosive which will reduce some of the plosives meaning like the peas and the d's you know that little puff of air that comes out of your mouth and into the microphone although i have my mic set a little off access and i have a pop filter on it as well however just to be on the safe side because sometimes i get a little animated move around i want to make sure that any plosives that made it through are reduced and then i have cla vocals which is a plug-in from waves which is basically a little bit of bass and a little bit of trouble i could even add some compression if i wanted to to reduce the modulation size but um i don't really need it i'm not i'm pretty much level in sorry i'm pretty much level in how i speak but if i was a little bit more animated in this i might add a little bit of compression and the next one i have is my parametric equalizer which was designed for me by the great tim tibbetts and it is set to give my voice a little bit more warmth to help reduce some of the sibilance that is in my natural speaking voice and then to increase some of the highs in my voice as well so i'm going to go ahead and apply this rack all right there we go so now if we take a look at the file now we can definitely see that the ambient noise is definitely reduced however you can still see where i used my clicker to mark a mistake and you can also see my big breaths so after my rack is applied the first thing i'm going to do is copy a little bit of this room tone and if you look over here in the bottom right corner you can see your selection and the duration of your selection meaning this section here the section that i have selected you can see how the duration changes that's how much time is within the selection that you have there so i'm going to copy about a little over half a second so 546. i'm going to copy that and then i'm going to use this room tone to adjust the head of my file because for acx the beginning of your file or the head of your file needs to be between a half a second and a second so i'm going to just add a little bit of the room tone actually added too much so i'm going to just highlight a little bit and delete it now you can see that i need to be between here and here for the beginning of my narration and i fall perfectly within that now i'm going to go through and remove my mistakes and edit this file i got to put my ears on so i can hear i can use my monitors too but i don't want it getting picked up by the microphone so i'm going to use my headphones and let's edit this grab my handy dandy okay so i actually started take a little sip of this hydration is key chapter one there we go so that is the actual beginning so i'm just going to highlight all of this and just delete it and make sure we're still within where we're supposed to be that's half a second to a second so we are good chapter one and then after the title heading which is typically chapter 1 chapter 2 or the the title's name i'll add about a full second of room tone in my younger and more vulnerable years but we've always but we've all but we've always so there's a few boo boos here so i'm going to just highlight those take my playhead and place it here at the beginning of the booboo and then highlight all of these boo-boos and then end right before the correct portion and then just delete all of the boo-boos but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way had some issues with communicative all right here's another booboo and i understood and i understood that he met okay so that is a continuation of a sentence so i don't want too much space between or too much of a pause between these two sections here so i'm going to get rid of that boo-boo plus some additional pause here so i'm just going to delete that in a reserved way and i understood that he meant a great deal more than that in consequence i'm inclined okay perfect so now i'm going to get rid of this booboo that i can see because i can see my clicker and also made me the victim of many curious natures to me so i think this was also a continuation of a sentence so i'm going to get rid of a little bit of this pause here and also made me the victim of not a few veteran boars yeah okay i can see another string of boo-boos here so let's listen to what these are oops and so it came about that and so it and okay so i'm going to highlight all of these boo-boos because i had a case of the tongue twisters today when it appears in a normal person and so it came about that in college i think this was actually a sentence beginning so i'm going to highlight this section and paste in that little bit of room tone to give it a little bit more of a pause before the next sentence and so it came about okay this one is a booboo mid-sentence so i'm going to reduce that pause a bit and get rid of the boo-boo out that in college i was unjustly accused of being a politician because i was privy to get rid of that pause because that's still the same sentence and then go to the end of the sentence and add in my most of the confidences were unsung my room tone perfect for the intimate revelations of reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope i am still a little afraid of missing a sense of a sense okay so now we're at the end of our file and the end or tail of your file needs to be between a second and five seconds so what i'm going to do is i have about just under four seconds of room tone here although there's a little bit of a breath or something there so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna delete that noise at the end and then let's see how much we have so just under three seconds which is fine so there is our audiobook sample so now the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go up to my favorites and normalize to negative 3 db okay now that our file is normalized to negative 3 db we're going to go over to our amplitude statistics then we're going to scan the selection so as we can see here our total rms amplitude is negative 20.76 which falls within the range of acx's compliance now let's just say that this file was a little bit too loud or a little bit too soft to fall within acx's standards what it typically is that's throwing it all off are some of these peaks these peaks in your dialogue like for instance this one over here could be a bit too high so what you could do had to move me over to the center so you can see what i'm doing you could go into your history here of what you've done with the file and go back a couple of steps right before you normalized it so what you could do then is let's say it was too quiet because when you normalize it it's taking the peaks and kind of normalizing everything else to that peak so what you could do is take one of these peaks and using the volume knob just turn the volume down just a little bit on that peak or even a couple of them if you wanted to just to reduce them just a little bit and then go back and do your normalized to negative 3 db and then rescan it and that will usually help get get you within the range for your rms but these peaks are typically the issue that throw your file out of whack for acx's rms standards so after you've scanned your file in amplitude statistics if it's too high or too low adjusting some of these peaks going back a few steps in your history to right before you normalized it adjusting some of those peaks in the modulation of your narration you know either up or down and then normalize it again and then test it again in your amplitude statistics and it might take a little bit of finessing in terms of the volume of your gain of your microphone and you know some of your processing but once you have it down you have it down but that's typically what throws those off is those peaks and in the modulation of your narration these peaks here that are too high or too low but this is what you want to look for at the end is your total rms amplitude of the entire file but just know that any adjustments you make to this file after you get it to your correct amplitude is going to change the overall amplitude of the file meaning if you add any more background noise removal or if you change the eq or if you add if you if you noticed after the fact that you made a booboo and you needed to fix it then just know that you want to take this file when you saved it after you edited it take it back to the basic file add in your repair and then do the processing again that way you have the entire file is at the appropriate rms level i hope that makes sense and i just didn't blow your head up and that is how you get your audio file to meet acx's standards for rms levels between negative 18 and negative 23 db so that brings us to the end of this video if you have any other questions or comments for me please leave them down below if you have a suggestion for another video or something that you'd like to know please let me know and i will make a video about it thank you very much for joining me on this video if you found this video helpful please hit that like button and subscribe because why not thank you so much for spending some time with me today and i will see you on the next video bye

Channel: VoiceOverAngela

Views: 2,428

Keywords: acx narrator, adobe audition, acx formatting, acx rms, acx audiobook narrator, acx standards, acx requirements, acx narrator beginner, adobe audio editing software, adobe creative cloud, acx adobe

Id: 19HuxUTt5B8

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021