Mastering Your Audiobook: An in-depth guide with Adobe Audition

Wes here from find away voices in in this video I would demonstrate how to adjust your audio files to meet our required audio specifications I am the head mastering engineer of the audio team where we review the files of each submitted audio book - in short it will meet the specifications of our long list of distribution partners this video is for individuals who might be having a difficult time meeting these requirements or this video can be used to verify once audio files will pass our specifications I must say that this is not the only way to adjust your audio files there are other methods that involve high-end professional audio equipment and software and plugins the methods that I will cover today are simple adjustments that can be made in an at-home small studio digital audio workstation environment our software of choice is Adobe Audition it is a very affordable DW to record edit and master audio book productions it is equipped with pre-installed tools that help you pinpoint exactly where your rms values are and other audio statistics of your files so you're in the know and you know exactly where those values are and you don't have to wonder a guess where those values could be our audio requirements break down into two different sections the first section would be audio file structure and format so this covers the order of the files and and how things need to be structured in order to meet the specifications and the second section would be the technical audio requirements so that would involve the audio statistics and the values loudness values different durations of hair time and tell time things we'll get into in a moment so we'll start off here with chapters credits and any introductions must be standalone files so this means you can't have a combination of two chapters contained in one audio file or a section and a chapter contained in one audio file each individual audio file has to contain a individual chapter here's an example of what not to do and how you can fill this requirement by having two sections combined in one audio file - dad from Kelly by Kelley Lydell read by Kelley Lydell for Mom and Aaron life is like a box of chocolates every day is a big bite rob Lydell so after listening to the opening credits we heard a dedication at the end of the opening credits and sometimes there's a dedication many times there's an introduction to the audio book these would be examples of the combination of two sections contained in one audio file in order to adjust this audio file to meet the specifications we would have to separate the two sections and save them as standalone audio files the next requirement would be files must be no longer than 120 minutes each to determine this you want to swing over to the duration of all of your audio files and ensure that none of these files are over 120 minutes long if you do discover that there's an audio file that is longer than 120 minutes that audio file must be broken down into sections and those individual sections must be saved as standalone files as well now when you upload those individual sections back to the voices site they must be named part 2 of the original file and they must have the same required specifications as the other individual files the next requirement would be proper order and should start with a verbal indication so this means that each audio file should begin with a chapter heading or a section heading acknowledgments the final letter dear dad more dad's dead so you want to make sure that each file has a proper chapter heading if you do not have a chapter heading that will cause your audio files to face delay when it comes to some of our distribution partners they're pretty strict on having headings - each chapter and for some audio files that are a authors note you might get away with not having a chapter heading for our author's note but for chapters and sections the best bet would be to have a proper heading in front of each of those audio files the next requirement is that the opening credits must contain the title and author and narrator names so this is a big one this will cause any audio book that we submit off to some of our most popular partners to be rejected to dad from Kelly by Kelly Lydell read by Kelly Lydell it is very important that the title the author and the narrator be identified inside of the opening credits and any additional information outside of the the title the author in the narrator might also be considered a combination of two different sections so if you have a title and author and a narrator then you also wanted to give a brief description of the audiobook that will be labeled as having a combined section with your opening credits and you will want to separate those two into individual audio files so for the opening credits you only want to include the title of the book the author's name and the narrator's name and if you want to provide copyright information that will be acceptable as well moving on to our next requirement the closing credits must reference the completion of the book so this means that the closing credits should reference the completion of the book it should state the end it should in some way shape or form let the listener know that the audiobook has come to an end it can simply be the narrator saying the end it can also be the opening credits played again just to stamp the book as a complete production to dad from Kelly by Kelly Lydell read by Kelly Lydell any more information than bringing the book to an end would be considered combining a section with the audio file so if you wanted to give more information about the book or if you wanted to give information about the author and about the author audio file would be best to separate that audio file and keep that into the back matter section of the audio book and leave the closing credits simply as the end of the book that wraps up our audio file structure and format we move on to our technical audio requirements and the first one is that all audio files must be human narrated and provided as flak or mp3 files to ensure that your audio files are in the right format swing over to the source format of the audio files and verify that each audio file is an mp3 or a flat file if you do have flag files we will prefer you to upload those files as opposed to mp3 files because flack is a higher quality format than an mp3 format our next requirement is that each audio file must have an RMS value between negative 23 decibels and 18 decibels with a peak below negative 3 decibels meeting this requirement can be very difficult for a lot of different engineers and audiobook producers and it's a matter of using the right software to generate and accurately pinpoint these values and once you get that nailed you're pretty much in a good space but it is the combination of knowing what to look for as well as having the software to calculate the values of the RMS and here in Adobe Audition this is what we use to calculate these values they give us a clean read of each value and we're solely seeking the total RMS value here to ensure that each file has the negative 23 through negative 18 decibels and it will address the peaks after we address the total RMS so total RMS is I'm a value that you want to address first in many different systems and doesn't get very complicated very quick what to break it down in a simplest form there are different ways to achieve this requirement and I'll start with the simplest way in the simplest way is via Adobe Audition because there there are a few buttons to push and the values are accurate so as you can see these audio files do not meet these specifications for total RMS or for peak values and in Adobe Audition there's a ITU RBS algorithm here which lets you set the target loudness to whatever you would like to set it to I'll usually go negative 20 point 5 decibels and we're gonna set this peak we're gonna keep it here at negative 3.5 and again hats off to the software this is all Adobe Audition doing most of the work for us once you run this process the software generates these values for you so as you can see the total RMS for all those files are hovering around negative 21 point 3 decibels in the peaks are all set to negative 3.5 well below the 3 negative 3 decibel threshold to meet this requirement that is the easiest way to meet this requirement another way to meet this requirement would be to in Adobe Edition as well hop over to the total RMS feature and set the total RMS to negative 20 point 5 and you'll see after you run this process that the peak values will adjust as well so as you can see the total RMS of all files is now negative twenty point five but that has also adjusted the peak values of all the audio files which are now above the negative three decibel requirement and unfortunately this will cause an audiobook to be rejected from some of our our partners and many engineers simply see the total RMS being within the range here and the peak RMS being outside of the range and they would hop over to the the peak settings and adjust the peak settings back into the proper requirement and after you run this process so as you can see we have a negative 3.5 peak value for all audio files and now that we've made that adjustment the total RMS for file is negative 23 which is outside of the range this is enough to drive someone crazy many times we get questions about changing the total RMS which also changes the peak and and back and forth and in this situation we would advise to do these steps in this exact order keep the total RMS of all files at negative twenty point five negative twenty point five all the other files will now read negative twenty point five decibels for the total RMS to get this peak under the threshold of negative three decibels we'll go into the effects drop down and we'll click on hard limiter so this unfortunately does take away some of the Headroom of your audio file which is a small trade-off for many different reasons this is only in cases in which the other processes didn't work and there was no way to adjust the total RMS and the peak and have both values within the right range so inside of the hard limiter you will see that you can set the hard limiter to negative three point five decibels this will simply chop off every single peak that goes past that threshold and after you apply this process you'll hop back over to the window here you see now this file reads negative three point five decibels well within the range to pass this requirement follow the same process for the the remaining files that are not within the range and you should be good to go to meet this requirement so the next requirement on the list is a maximum noise flow of negative 60 decibels the noise floor is the audio that is present when the narrator is not speaking so to determine this value we will simply highlight an area where the narrator is not narrate ink and loop this area so we can see exactly where it comes up down on the vu meter at the bottom so once you analyze the vu meter when the narrator is not speaking and you don't see the volume going up past negative 60 decibels you're good to meet this requirement if the narrator a me I'm sorry if the noise floor is above negative 60 this can be a tough one to adjust and in this situation you really want to make sure that you take the right steps and pre-production in your recording setup and the recording environment to address all noise floor issues so at this stage we're kind of in the mastering part of the production process and the noise floor set is something that should be addressed in pre-production so this involves the recording environment and the equipment that you record with as well as the tracking engineer that records in production our next requirement is that the format of the audio files must be at 192 kilobits force per second or higher for the bitrate the separate must be at 44.1 kilohertz and all files must be either mono or stereo files and it can't be a combination of both all audio files submitted to the find away voices site must either be an mp3 or FLAC format for the mp3s the following sample rate and bitrate must be accounted for so as you can see we'll swing over to the source format of the audio files and Adobe Audition and we'll clearly see that the separate is at 44.1 the bitrate is at 192 kilobits per second and all files are in mono files so we won't have any problems meeting the specification with these files here if you did discover that your files were in the improper format you can always adjust those settings once you export the audio files out of your da you the next requirement is head duration as must be between 0.5 and one second of silence which is room tone so this means once you scroll to the front of each audio file I'll bring it into the multitrack window to give you a better visual we are ok so here are all of our audio files and the narration of the audio should begin within 0.5 seconds to 1 second of the beginning of the audio file so this entire area here would would be considered the the head of the audio file so if you see that there's a head of the audio file that is longer than 0.5 to 1 second this would be a reason in which one of our partners would reject the audio files due to having an extended head duration so to just this simply just trim back the head time to be within the range and continue to do so for the proceeding files so now that that adjustment has been made to all of the audio files we can visually see that every audio file has a header ation that is within the 0.5 to 1 second range so we are all set to meet the requirement of head duration being between 0.5 to 1 second for all files the next requirement is tail duration must be between 1 and 5 seconds at the end of a audio file so this means the end of the audio file we apply the same principle as we did for the head but now we need to ensure that each file has one second to 5 seconds so here we can see that the end of this audio file has 5.2 seconds and we can determine how long this tail is because once we've highlighted the end of the audio file we can use the selection view window to see exactly how long that duration of highlighted audio is and this would result in a rejection from our partners so we simply trim this back to four seconds to meet the requirement and we follow the same practice for the remainder of the other audio files so after the tale duration has been adjusted for all audio files and we're good to go as far as the tale duration be in between one second and five second for all audio files we move on to our last requirement which is no copyright material or extraneous sounds which can be a combination of any type of background noise interfering with the audio files this is something that we really can't gage there's honestly not a lot of things that you can do in post-production to address these issues our best advice would be to address outside noises during the pre-production stage and there's really this kind of ties our hands once we're at the final mastering phase and the essentially this delivery of your audio files to a partner that those things come about with all of the requirements met that we've covered in the past few minutes this concludes the breakdown of our audio requirements I hope this can be used as a reference to anyone who might need just a small bit of of greater detail and clarity in and why these specifications are what they are and how to adjust your audio files to meet them if you do have more questions you can always reach out to us as support at find away voices comm

Channel: Findaway Voices by Spotify

Views: 26,451

Keywords: audiobooks, audiobook mastering, audiobook editing, adobe audition, adobe audition tutorial, audiobook editing tutorial

Id: x387JWPhKEg

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019