Recording an Audiobook: How I Edit in Adobe Audition

hello and welcome back to the green workbench today I'm producing an audiobook of one of my books creating my own audiobook and this is my process I want to walk through that process in case you are trying to do the same thing I'm using Adobe Adobe Audition now the first thing you need to do is uh you want this file to be accepted by the audiobook companies namely Audible and so you need to do it in the format they want and then create the end product they want and that's what this is doing so first you record it at the sample rate uh 44.1 Hertz mono 24 bits create your new chapter hit OK and then you're ready to record all right I'm not going to show myself recording this chapter but I'll get back to you after it's done to show you how I edit it okay so I finished recording the chapter this is the entire chapter here I want to bring it back down to a smaller section now one thing a mistake that I initially made before I researched it is you don't want to use an effect that creates silence it's sound it just it doesn't work it sounds odd to the ear creates kind of a ringing noise in your ear and it's just not natural so in audiobooks it's not silent it's just the white noise of nothing happening in a quiet room so I'm going to take a section here you can see that this section isn't it's quiet I'm going to copy it and then delete the beginning this is just me getting set up that's probably a cough or clearing my throat and then control V or paste just that white noise so anywhere where I have extra noise see there's a little bump right here I can just highlight and replace it with that white noise now I'm going to listen to the whole thing I can use audio as I'm listening but also visual Clues so if I've ever see if I can find one here right here so if I ever make a mistake or I don't like how my intonation on a certain sentence I use a clicker because this is just a dog training clicker you can get for a couple bucks and that creates that visual cue that there's something here that's a mistake so I can tell that it's this visually because the audio signature of these two this section right here is very similar to this section right here but I'm going to listen to it just to be sure and then all I have to do is select it from where the good one starts to the beginning of the bad one and then paste in that white noise in that section so I'm going to walk through the entire chapter that way and once you get used to how your voice works so like this right here for me is usually a consonant at the end of a word so let's see how I did that D or a p or a t but if I have something at the beginning a pickup to a sentence that's usually me taking a breath and I want to get rid of that noise so I can tell visually as I'm listening where I need to pay attention to where I'm going to need to paste in that white noise so I'm going to go ahead and do that you don't need to sit and watch me do all of that so I will get back to you sometimes you have a pretty large section but you have that clicker there so you know and I went back it was a full pretty long sentence I had to go back to which all I have to do is highlight it and then click the paste button and I'm ready to go now if you make a mistake so say I delete this and that's a mistake you can hit Ctrl Z and it takes you back to your next Last Action so it's not the end of the world now if you need to re you listen to a section and you need to just completely replace it you can do that if you hit re if you set your marker at a certain spot and then hit record it starts recording over it so you don't want to record over so what you would do is just create paste in that white noise for just a little bit longer than your the sentence you are re-recording hit record it hit stop and now you have that new section right there where you wanted it and you can delete the old one so that's actually pretty easy to do all right I've gone through the whole thing make sure you don't just use the visual sometimes there's a like I'm in a basement and even so sometimes a loud enough car goes by outside or a big enough truck that I get rumbling that I didn't notice while I'm recording so that's a time when you have to go back and record that sentence again and you're only going to hear that when you listen with good headphones all right at the end I'm going to add about two seconds now it's time to run all of the effects so I'm going to select all the first one I run is a built-in noise reduction restoration adaptive noise reduction here are my settings I used basic settings that I found online and then kind of tweaked them to what works tends to work for my microphone and voice but this is a good place for you to start if you want to copy those hit apply and it will run that noise reduction you've taken most of the noise out already just with that white noise but anything that you've missed anything in the background it still kind of cleans it up and because it's adaptive and you've set it at those percentages it's not bringing it to Absolute quiet which you don't want like I said next I set up my own rack and I looked at an article on how to do this I'm not going to teach you how to do it but I'll show you my rack and here let me click on each one of these most of these are freeware some cost a couple of bucks so this first one the dc1a3 is from klinghelm and these are my settings the next one is a tdsr from Tech evasion again my settings this helps with if you that s sound that you get with a lot of words in English saw an EQ again here are my settings then single brand band compressor is built in and then the automatic click remover again built in so those all I have to do is hit audiobook preset and then apply and it will apply all of those effects at once so you don't have to do them individually you don't have to reset them individually and it really takes no time at all the next effect we want to run is to normalize and this is for audible because you want every chapter you don't want someone listening and suddenly your chapter is super loud and then it's super quiet so they have to keep adjusting the volume button you want it to be normalized through all of the tracks so I'm going to set that actually at three um it was set above that because I had a my last chapter I had some issues with one spot where it peaked but so negative three decibels hit apply and I've found that if I run the mono or the single band compressor again same settings and then normalize again that tends to flatten out any large jumps and is helpful so I'm going to run the normalizer again now there's a way to check to make sure that audible will accept this and I'm going to show you that now so I'm going to export the file and see here this is when you originally recorded these are the settings you want the 44.1 Hertz mono 24 bit in your recording I'm going to save this as an MP3 now I'm going to open up my folder where those are saved my audiobook folder all right go down to chapter 60 open with audacity that's freeware if you're not familiar with audacity now select all so this is a plug-in that's not available for audition it's only available for audacity which is while I'm using it it's a free plug-in you can download ACX check this checks and make sure that it meets the audible standard so this is kind of what audible will do when it is processing your audio and it shows you it passed if it didn't pass you have to go back and rework your effects most of the time if it doesn't pass for me I have to go back and do the single band compressor and normalize again that's why I just do it twice to start with so I know it's good to go it's accepted by Audible now I come back and just save the project and save the big WAV file so not just the compressed MP3 in case I need to go back later and then close and I'm ready to move on to the next chapter so that is my process of recording and then editing my audiobook chapter by chapter once you get used to the it actually goes fairly quickly the most difficult part is the actual narration not the editing so let me know if you have any questions hopefully this was helpful Please Subscribe hit the notification button and I will see you next time on the green workbench thanks for watching

Channel: thegreenworkbench

Views: 350

Keywords: author, audiobook, recording, voice acting

Id: JgMRwXf9nN0

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023