Using Audacity Voice Presets

Audio Production
1

I recently purchased

Audacity Presets For Voice Overs
Condenser Microphone
unique: 1699990792

Great idea, thank you.

I’m a newbie; being going about a year, and I have done a few voiceovers and audiobooks. And still learning.

I installed the preset and appears to be working.

I want to use this macro when submitting auditions for voiceovers.

However, what I normally do is analyse the audio using ACX Check. As you will appreciate, I use this when submitting content for audiobooks.

When I analyse the audio after using the preset, the results are:

Peak level -1.00 dB Fail (too high)

RMS level - 15.07 dB Fail (too loud)

Noise Floor - 47.95 dB (too noisy)

My questions are - does this matter, can I submit this as an audition for a voiceover, or do I need to do more editing?

Hope you can help.

Best regards

Alan

2

Great question, Alan.

You should certainly make sure to hit ACX requirements before submitting. While I have no specific Audacity presets for ACX specifically there are a few general rules you can follow to get towards those requirements. I’ll five tips one by one:

  1. Peak level - A normalize to -3 dB will fix this.
  2. RMS level - Taking your audio down by 2-5 dB you should hit the average RMS required.
  3. Noise floor - Sounds like you have a bit of background noise in your environment. Try to reduce anything that’s causing so much background (-47.95 dB is on the high side) like air conditioning or other noise. Also, consider using noise reduction on your recorded audio before applying Audacity presets however reducing amount of noise while recording is more optimal that reducing in post with plugins.

Hope that helps!

3

Hi Mike, thank you for the reply.

I kinda thought that if I recorded the raw audio, and applied the presets, then I’d be good to go. But it looks like I need to do a lot more editing.
And point 3 is a strange one. I’m lucky to have a home studio where there is very little to no background noise. However, I will keep working on it.

Regards

Alan