[Tutorial] Audacity for ACX - Remove breaths, mouth noises and meet ACX Requirements

hey everybody this is a quick video to show narrators that are working with a CX how I use audacity to edit my narrations there are plenty of other software packages out there but I think audacity is pretty much the easiest one to learn and there are a few tools I want to share in this video that make it a whole lot easier to do your narrations and have made my life a whole lot easier for this demonstration I just grabbed a book off of my bookshelf this happens to be the art of happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard C Cutler and as you can see here in my timeline I've recorded about just uh about 40 seconds from the book just for demonstration purposes this is completely raw recording so let's go ahead and just first take a listen to the recording and you'll notice right here there's some silence we'll talk about that in a minute chapter 14 dealing with anxiety and building self-esteem it is estimated that in the course of a lifetime at least one in four Americans will suffer from a debilitating degree of anxiety or worry severe enough to meet the criteria for the medical for the medical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder but even those who never suffer from a pathological or disabling state of anxiety will at one time or another experience excessive levels of worry and anxiety that serve no useful purpose and do nothing but undermine their happiness and interfere with their ability to accomplish their goals okay so that's just the pure raw recording straight off my microphone and the first step that I usually do is I go in and I edit any areas that I made a mistake now you'll see here in this area right here you see this red line and if you were listening to it you you've probably heard that I snapped at that point so whenever I'm reading and if I make a mistake I snap my fingers close to the microphone and it produces this red line because if we go up into the audacity menu and we select view I've put down here a little mark next to show clipping and what this does is if your audio is clipping it all it'll give you a little red line and it's useful in this case because I want it to clip whenever I'm whenever I'm snapping at the microphone because I want a very visually easy to see so if quickly if I show you if I turn this off you'll notice that that red line will go away now you can still see obviously that the waveform still obviously clips but it usually it makes it a little bit easier to see if we turn the clipping on so all I'm going to do here is I'm going to zoom I'm going to select this area here and I'm going to zoom in to just that selected area and on this in this case what you're going to do is you're going to push if you're on a Mac you push command E or on a PC I guess it would be ctrl e we're just gonna zoom in and if I listen to this right here for the medical diagnosis all right so we're gonna start with for the medical for the medical and I'm just gonna go ahead and highlight this area that I don't need and just click the backspace or the Delete key and just the criteria for the medical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder okay great now again if I want to see the whole timeline I can hit my command key and F or control key and F and now I can go back and I can see my whole timeline here now the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure one of the things that people run into is being able to meet the ACS requirements now there are a few things first of all that you must have in place in order to meet them you're going to need a well treated room you're going to need a decent microphone that is not a USB microphone you're going to need those to meet it but if we look over here on this on the AC X on the audacity team.org there is a page here called audio book mastering and what they've done here is they've put together a step-by-step process to make sure that you are meeting the ACX requirements and as you notice here they also have a little plugin called a CX check that will make that'll let you know whether or not you're meeting the requirements now here's the process right here it's basically three steps that you would use in your effects menu first you're going to do an equalization as you can see here then you're gonna do RMS normalization and then a limiter now it tells you the exact settings that you want for each of these but what I've done and what many people do is in AC X I've set up a chain and well first I want to make sure I select all here and I'm gonna go up to file and chains now you can edit your changes and that's how you're going to create it when you go to edit chains you're going to do add a chain and you can see up here I have one listed as AC X and it gives me my steps its equalization norm RMS normalize and limiter and I and so whenever I and I've saved that so now whenever I run that chain it's gonna automatically apply each of those effects to my to my audio here so I'm gonna go apply chain I'm gonna select here AC X and apply to current project and you're gonna see it's going to go through the steps here now the other thing that we have is that AC X if we look here the AC X check and up here is the link and I'll have a link to this in the description so you can just click on that and go right to this this AC X check now a little bit confusing here is this one is not gonna be under the effects menu but it's gonna be under analyzed so we're going to analyze and you're gonna see AC x check here click on AC X check and it's going to run through and it's going to make sure we meet all of these AC x requirements so for the peak level the RMS level the noise floor all of that and you can see down here clip meets AC x requirements so it means we're good now the next thing that I want to go through and do is I want to go through and take out any breaths or mouth noises now in particular I have a problem with this I I haven't I'm fairly new still taught to audio book narration and I haven't really gotten down how to breathe uh right and I feel like I make a lot of mouth noises so when we need to do this let's go ahead and zoom in on a part here somewhere and we can find some so let's see I'm not sure how well you'll be able to hear this line YouTube but chapter 14 and ever you're listening to this in your headphones and you whenever you're editing your audio books your narrations you should definitely listen in headphones but whenever you listen in here headphones you're gonna be able to hear any kind of breaths or mouth noises chapter 14 dealing with anxiety and building self-esteem it is estimated that in the course of a lifetime at least 1 in 4 Americans will somehow let's go back to right here lifetime at least now in this part right there in my again it might be hard for you to hear at this point I can hear myself breathe in I just a little right very very subtle now in order to fix that people will do a lot of things one thing some people will do is they'll go up here and they'll click silence audio right and if I I'm gonna try that boom and then if I listen back it's of a lifetime at least 1 in for now sounds probably it sounds pretty good the problem is that makes the audio completely silent we don't want that because it's gonna sound it's gonna really sound cut up if you do it that way so I'm gonna command Z to undo that now the other thing that we could do is we recorded all of this sound at the beginning just some room noise right just me being quiet and just recording the sound of the room now what we could do is we could just take some of this so from about two seconds to four seconds there it's pretty quiet I could see over here where I start to make some mouth noises or other noises so we can just click you know we could just copy that and we can just scroll back down our timeline let's go down here and I could highlight this and just paste that in there problem is as you see that makes this giant gap in there now you could of course just ya you know try to delete that down to where you want it to be but there's a tool that's gonna make this really useful for you so let's just undo that again and the tool that you want to get and this is one of the most useful tools you can get I think for audacity and for audio book narrations is punch copy paste now what this is going to do is you can you can select an area of audio particularly an area of room and then when you paste it it's only going to paste into the selected area that you have so if you highlight if you copy two seconds of room noise two seconds of audio but you only need one second when you highlight that one second and you paste it it's only going to paste over the one second again I'll leave this link in there and it with you it gives a great description on how to use this and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this you'll see the two downloads there are actually two things that you need to download here make sure you get the current version two things that you want to download the punch copy and the punch paste and then you'll install them I'm not gonna go into how to install them if you need to know I just Google install audacity effects and that'll get it for you but what this is going to do is I'm gonna go back over here to my it's my room noise and there's let's find to make sure it's really clean alright for about three seconds from about right here okay this this is pretty clean audio and I'm gonna go up to my effects and all the way down here we're gonna have punch copy paste and we're gonna just click that and this is gonna come up with a dialog box now in this case you want to make sure you put replace because if you don't put replace and it's gonna if it's on safe then you won't be able to replace what's already on the clipboard so you want to just go to copy replace the rest of these settings you can pretty much leave as is and then click okay so now it tells me I've copied one point three nine five seconds of audio now what we're gonna do is right here you can kind of see there's some audio now this is not that important because we're gonna probably delete that anyway but if we listen again I'm not sure how much you can hear that but that's me making a lot of mouth noises getting ready to speak so if I just highlight that the parts that I want to go and I go back up here to effects and right under punch copy copy paste is punch paste and I click that and boom now it's pasted that in and it's just pasted in the area that I selected now if you if you look on menu up here you'll notice that there's a little keyboard shortcut this keyboard shortcut is not not by default I actually set this up myself if you go into audacity and preferences and into keyboard you can if you scroll down here somewhere I'm not sure where but somewhere in here under your effects you're gonna find your yeah here's your effects menu and yeah here's punch paste I went ahead and set up shift command V just because it's I find it you know bother someone I'm going through the audio and constantly having to go up here and click the menu so now I'm just able to just do it with a keyboard shortcut so the one thing you definitely want to do is right here before this dial I for here before this starts we're gonna just and I'm gonna do this so the keyboard shortcuts just make sure that that's all cleaned up chapter 14 dealing with anxiety and building self-esteem it is estimated that in the course of a lifetime ethanol we're gonna go back to this spot here where let's let's get a little bit closer here first we're gonna go back to the spot where we heard a little breath lifetime Headley and you can even if you look closely here you can see the the breath on there so I'm gonna just highlight that command shift V and boom lifetime at least one in four Americans will suffer from a debilitating degree of anxiety or worry soon there's another big breath right there so I'm just gonna go through that and paste worried severe enough to meet the criteria for the met again there's some breaths in there so we're gonna go through and just shift command V because now once you've got that on the clipboard you can just paste that room noise into anywhere you want hey you probably don't want to overdo it you know if there's some breaths in the middle of words and things like that you don't want to make it sound unnatural but whenever you have those obvious breaths or obvious mouth others you want for the medical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder but even though now here if I scroll back here I can see a little line here I can't quite I can't even hear that with my headphones on but just to be safe I'm gonna go even those who never suffer from a pathological or disabling state of anxiety we'll look again another breath right there and I just highlighted and shift command V will at one time or another another big breath and you can see this one right here we're gonna just do that at one time or another experience excessive levels of worry and anxiety that's okay and there another breath so that that serve no useful purpose can hear that breath right there you can hear it and you can see it a lot of times you can see it here in the break sometimes you can't but you see that what it went from there's a little bit of waviness in the wave waveform there and it's just pretty much flat analysis and do nothing but undermine their happiness and in another one and interfere with their ability to accomplish their goals okay and then I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna look at the whole thing here so we've gone ahead we've taken out that those those breaths I'm gonna go ahead and delete there's a little bit of sound here at the end I think that's probably just where I was stopping the recording now what I also like to do and because we need a little bit of room noise at the beginning and the ending so I'll go here to the beginning and we're gonna zoom in there and we're listen about just a little bit so I can see the seconds a little better so it looks like we're starting at about 8 seconds right a little bit after 8 seconds is where we start so I like to leave about two seconds one to two seconds here so I'm gonna just go to 66 seconds here actually let's go 6 seconds to 80 seconds now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually just do a regular copy-paste so I'm gonna copy this here onto my clipboard and then I'm gonna just delete all of that because I don't need any of that anymore and we're just gonna delete and then I'm gonna go to the end by kicking it clicking and on my keyboard and actually before I do that I'm gonna just delete this all the way to the end of where I was recording and I'm gonna just paste to that clean room noise onto the end so now I have room noise on the and and on the beginning ability to accomplish their goals alright so if we take a look now we're all done we've got it pretty much all set up I might still go through here and just adjust for timing and whatnot but again check the description below you'll be able to see these links too you're gonna want to make sure you're meeting the ACX requirements and this punch copy/paste is very very useful for making sure you're removing any breaths or mouth noises alright thanks a lot we'll see you next time

Channel: Jacob McEndollar

Views: 43,573

Keywords: ACX, audactity, audiobooks, narration, narrators, mouth noises, remove breaths, voice acting, voice over, Audiobook mastering, punch copy paste

Id: wnutKoBzmpA

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/jjdlg]

Clear, informative and concise. Well done, thanks for taking the time.

[u/TheRealMcDuck]

Very good idea.

[u/aSamsquanch]

This is super helpful, Thank you. Embarrassing at what I haven't been doing to present things more professionally.

[u/Dracomies]

That Punch/Paste is so crucial. This is really great stuff!

[u/jenrusty]

Thank you for sharing!

[u/startoonhero]

commenting to save for later, thanks haha

[u/GabrielDunn]

Wow! Best audacity tutorial for narration ever. Cheers brother!

[u/mollyberry]

Great tutorial, and great style as well <3 Thank you for sharing!

[u/HalleckG65]

I'm late to the party, but wanted to say thank you. After fiddling around with all of this in my other DAW, and not being terribly confident I had it right, you've simplified the whole process very well. I practiced your method a few times and it was immediately better. When I got my first offer through ACX, I actually declined (re: chickened out) because I wasn't sure I'd be able to meet all of the requirements with my setup. Now I think I have the confidence to go back and try again!