Recording & Formatting Files for ACX

hello and welcome back to my channel i thought i would do another follow-up video to a previous video that i did on auditioning or selecting an audiobook and then auditioning for it or acx in this video i wanted to go a little bit deeper because once you audition for an audiobook and you're offered to produce an audio book then what do you do in this video i'll walk you through how i record it how i name the files what the formatting is and then of course we then upload it to acx for approval from the rights holder or the rh or the publisher or whomever is uh has the audio book posted for production so let's get into it okay first we'll start with what acx needs as their what is their required formatting as you can see here each file must measure between negative 23 decibels and negative 18 decibels i'll show you how to do that each file must have peak values of no more than negative 3 db you must have a noise floor no higher than negative 60 db and then i'll show you how to save each file what the bit rate is and what format it should be and then also they give you the option to submit all the files in either mono or stereo i just stick with mono i could see stereo if there were a lot of sound effects or music but typically there's not in an audio book they actually they don't acx doesn't say that you can't have music or sound effects they do say that it tends to distract the listener but if the rights holder or author really wants music or sound effects in their audio book that's perfectly fine um but 99.9 of the audiobooks that i narrate are all submitted in mono um each file must be no longer than 120 minutes i have never come across a section or chapter of a book that has been longer than two hours um of course the audiobooks must be narrated by a human so that won't be an issue here so how do we do all of this well first of all when i before i begin an audio book i will create in a folder on my desktop now and as i've mentioned before i have different folders on my desktop for each platform that i find work on you know one for fiverr one for upwork one for acx you know one for voices123 bodalgo wherever and then within that acx folder i'll have a separate folder for each book that i narrate and then i will only keep them there for maybe a few months or until the book has already gone through uh acx's qa and have been approved and then i'll move that book off to an external hard drive just so i don't take up too much space on my computer anyway so within that folder that's where i'll keep all of the separate files uh raw and finished so everything's all together in one place so now let's go on to the audio file here is a chapter of a book that i'm working on that i've already narrated um this is the raw file so as you can see there's a lot of little boo-boos and breaths and again as i've mentioned before in other videos i use a clicker to mark mistakes if i make a boo-boo or if i just sound weird don't want to retake it and a lot of people will actually do punch and roll which is where you'll record if you make a booboo you can kind of stop it there start over from where you left off and then re-narrate it kind of edit as you go i don't because i think just the way that my office here is set up because i tend to narrate this way and my computer's here then i can't really it just interrupts the flow for me so another option you have is to use a dog clicker it makes a mark in the audio file so you can mark your mistakes and then come back and edit them later um so for the sake of time in this video i'm not going to edit this this file i'm just going to show you how we format these so just to take a step back before i even start narrating i'm going to create an audio file like this so for audition you could hit shift control n and it brings up the new audio file box uh typically i will name a file like this i'll start with 0 zero being the very first file which is opening credits i'll start with zero zero and then underscore the title of the book oops all right title and then period what the file what the file is so this one would be opening credits and then for your sample rate you want to change this to 44 100. channels is mono your bit depth is 16. okay and then i start narrating and then also side note if you come up here to the metadata for the id3 tags for the title i will also put in the title of the book and then what it is oops spelling credits credits so what this does then when the audiobook is playing on someone's mp3 player or in their car or whatever they're listening it to listening to it on that title will be what scrolls across the bottom or the top or wherever it'll say you know the title of the book and then opening credits the title of the book chapter one title of the book chapter two or the chapter 2 and then the chapter's name you could do that too that's just a nice little touch we should be doing which is what i do for my clients and then you would go on and narrate that section let's go back to file i already have done after i have it narrated and edited i will always just double check that i have the proper amount of roon tome room tone at the head which in this case is half a second to a second of room tone at the head so i'm going to just delete some of this room tone sample way over okay so i am just like hair under a second and that's fine i usually do between a half a second and a second this is fine for head tone or room tone at the head and then at the tail we will have um see i've got a little bit more so i'm gonna get rid of this little bloop there for the tail i'll usually have between three and four seconds round usually around three and a half seconds of room down at the end so this would be fine so that and i use this little counter down here at the bottom to tell me what the selection how much time is in that selection it's very handy tool i'll use it all the time okay so there we go head and tail is done and then i will go to my effects rack and go to my audio book setting now in this rack i have a de-noise i have ns1 mono which removes a lot of or any kind of background noise that i have any computer fan or you know maybe someone outside walking by airplane going overhead it'll take out some of those extraneous noises that you don't want also rx7d mouth click i am plagued with mouth noise so this plug-in works really really well for removing mouth noise um use it all the time wonderful lifesaver and then i also have an rx7 deplosive and as i've mentioned another video video video before i'm getting all excited as i've mentioned in another video before i have my mic positioned this way kind of off axis and pointed directly at my mouth so that keeps the puffs of air when i say you know peter picked a pack of peppers those puffs of air aren't going into the mic to create plosives they're i'm off axis so they're going this way but the mic is still picking up everything that i'm saying but just to be on the safe side because plosives are bad i have the deplosive in here also and then i have a couple of equalizers in here it's probably overkill but i like the way that it sounds tim tibbetts designed this uh particular preset parametric equalizer for me uh tim i'm sorry that i have the other plugin in there also don't be offended but thank you so much for setting this preset up for me i love you so those are pretty much all i have in there for my audiobook rack and then i will apply this and then you can see the difference that the that these plugins will have as soon as it's done rendering okay there we go so let's take a look at this difference see you can see that all of that noise that was there before is no longer there so if we play this section if you watch the volume bar down here it doesn't move at all but again perfect just where it should be and that is mostly due to the ns1 and the denoise great so we have that done sounds good and then now we're going to go and select the all of the audio in here you'll go up to favorites and you normalize it to negative 3 db okay and then what you want to do if you don't have this in your rack add amplitude statistics you can always go to window and then or am i not saying and then select it here and then pull it into your little work area here your effects area so we go to amplitude statistics and then we want to scan this section make sure this is still highlighted and the selection and then it'll show you your peak amplitude of negative 3.01 because that's where we need to be and then what we want to look at is our total rms amplitude see right here we're at negative 24 56 and as we looked at before each file must measure between negative 23 and negative 18. so this one is still not going to pass qa so what i'm going to do is i'm going to let's go back to our history and i'm going to go back to normalize and then i'm going to go raise my volume a bit and then i'm going to normalize it again and now my total rms is now negative 22.58 so it barely passes within the parameters for the acx file so then once we have the the rms correct the file format is correct the noise floor is below negative 60. then once your file meets all of those parameters just save it as mp3 and move on to the next one and then keep going until your entire audiobook is done and then all you have left to do is just to upload it to acx click i'm done and your rights holder will review your audio book and if they're happy with it they will approve it and everything is fine then it gets shipped off to retail and you start earning your royalties or you get paid so that is how we record and format a audio book section for acx if there's any other questions you have please do not hesitate to reach out to me and ask love hearing from you guys please subscribe and like and leave me some fun comments thank you so much i'll see you on the next video

Channel: VoiceOverAngela

Views: 5,186

Keywords: acx, audiobooks, how to audition for acx, how to narrate for acx, voice over, adobe audition, fiverr, voice actor, acx tips, audiobook narrator tips, audible

Id: Ecjpl8F6fWk

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020