Increase Audio Volume Izotope Rx

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You've spent weeks recording and preparing your audiobook. Before you send it off to your publisher, here's your definitive guide to guarantee successful submissions every single time!

  • IZotope develops award-winning audio software and plug-ins for mixing, mastering, restoration, and more. RX 7 Standard. RX 7 Standard is the audio repair toolkit.
  • Apr 11, 2016 Dialogue & Voiceover Track Editing in RX 5 Advanced Audio Editor - Duration: 8:34. IZotope, Inc. 36,338 views.

Apr 10, 2013 Did you overload your converter while recording? Or did you receive something that wasn't taped properly? This tutorial is for you then. Get a demo of iZotop.

How to professionally record audio for audiobooks

Recording quality matters

First things first, in order to provide the most enjoyable experience for your listeners, you want to make sure that the recording quality is top-notch. Spend time on proper microphone setup and placement to capture the cleanest audio recording possible. Make sure you use a pop filter to get those plosives under control. Check out this article for more tips on recording vocals at home.

Keep consistency in mind

Given that audiobooks tend to be long, there's a high chance that you'll be recording over the course of multiple days, or even weeks. As such, you need to pay special attention to make sure your recordings stay consistent—using the same microphone, in the same room, at the same position, every single time.

You'll also want to make sure that the voice actor sounds the same throughout as well. No one wants to hear a high-energy recording in one chapter followed by a tired, low-energy recording in the next. So make sure things stay consistent intention-wise.

When it comes to editing your takes together, you'll want to make sure consistency shines through here as well. This particularly relates to spaces between sentences and overall dynamics, something Dialogue Contour in RX could help correct.

How to structure and slice your audio for submission as an audiobook

Don’t leave out any information

Many audiobook rejections happen due to missing required information. More often than not, this includes missing opening and closing credits. Start your audiobook by stating the name of the audiobook, name of the author(s), and name of the narrator(s). Check the cover art and manuscript to make sure you're including all the correct information.

Slice your files into logical sections

When submitting your audiobook, you'll need to make sure that each chapter is its own audio file. This will allow users to jump to individual chapters as they need to. Each file should have between 0.5–1 second of silence at the beginning and between 1–5 seconds of silence at the end. The extra space is required for encoding files into different formats. Plus, the silence also gives your listeners subtle audio cues that they have finished a section and that a new one is about to begin. Many publishers will reject your submission if the audio files aren't spliced correctly, so take the time to double-check that you have done this accurately.

Make sure you have clearly recorded section headings

Something that many people forget is to record clear auditory section headings. These include 'Foreword,' 'Chapter 1,' Chapter 2,' and so on. For starters, this is a great way for your audience to be able to tell that a new section is starting. It's also helpful when your listeners are jumping through the various chapters in search of a particular one. This will allow them to instantly hear when they reach the desired one. Since most publishers will reject audio files longer than 120 minutes, find a place where you'll be able to slice the file into smaller sections. Since each file has to begin with a heading, don't forget to record a new heading at the slicing points. If the section began with 'Chapter 6,' start the next section with 'Chapter 6, continued.'

Don’t forget the sample!

People love hearing snippets before buying. When submitting your audiobook for review, you'll want to include a properly formatted audio sample. This audio sample should start with narration, not the opening credits. Since samples are publically accessible to everyone, they cannot include explicit material, so ensure that you're submitting a carefully chosen fragment.

How to clean up your audiobook’s audio

You'll want to edit out any weird sounds that shouldn't be in the final recording—coughs, loud breathing, sniffling, sneezing, rustling, mouse clicks, and various outtakes. Comp together the perfect take that sounds beautiful from start to finish.

Try RX’s Repair Assistant

If you're recording your audiobook at home, some unwanted noise will ultimately creep into your recordings—simply RX it out! Whether it's the AC fan or cars driving by outside, you'll want to make sure you remove any excess noise. iZotope's RX can truly work some magic here. Repair Assistant’s Dialogue mode will analyze your audio and detect noise, clipping, clicks, and other unwanted sounds, allowing you to remove all the excess noise in just a few easy steps. If you're an RX 7 Advanced user, you'll have access to even more comprehensive functionality, including the ability to use spectral de-noising and manually repairing any audio mistakes.

In this video, I’m going to cover how to use the brand new Dialogue Isolate module in RX 6 in a post-production context, using a sample that features dialogue.

Once you’ve downloaded the test file called, “Post Production_Dialogue Isolate,” for this tutorial from the RX web page, and opened it in RX 6 by clicking and dragging it into the RX application window, or by opening RX 6 and pressing Command+O or Control+O on a PC to locate and open the sample, your RX window should look like mine, with the file, “Post Production_Dialogue Isolate” in a tab on the top-left hand side of the screen.

Informed by machine learning to recognize and separate spoken dialogue from non-stationary background noise, such as crowds, traffic, footsteps, weather, or other noise with highly variable characteristics, Dialogue Isolate can be particularly effective at increasing the level of dialogue in challenging, low signal-to-noise ratio conditions.

Have a listen to this sample, which features some dialogue, and a very noisy background.

[voice sample]

Let’s use Dialogue Isolate to bring the dialogue center stage, and attenuate some of that background noise.

First, we see some parameters in the module. Dialogue gain controls the gain of the components in your audio recognized as speech. We can leave this slider at 0dB to reduce noise, or lower the slider to reduce the level of spoken dialogue.

In this case, we want to reduce noise, and bring the dialogue center stage, so we’ll leave it at 0dB.

Noise gain controls the gain of the components in your audio recognized as noise. We can keep the slider low to increase dialogue intelligibility, or increase it to 0dB while turning down dialogue gain to only hear the isolated noise.

Given the nature of our example, I’d like to really bring down the noise gain so that we can focus on the dialogue as much as possible.

Next, we have separation strength. For large values, meaning if I slide it to the right, the processing will more strictly define what it classifies as dialogue, which can result in more background noise reduction at the cost of possible reduction of speech.

For small values, if I slide it to the left, the processing will more broadly define what it classifies as dialogue, which will allow more background noise through, but will reduce the possibility of speech loss as a result of the processing.

Again, dialogue is king in this example, so I’ll bring my separation strength to 10. I should note that Dialogue Isolate will still process, even when the reduction strength is set to zero.

Let’s press process and listen back to our results.

I’ll press space bar to play our newly dialogue isolated track.

[voice sample, processed]

Here’s before.

[voice sample, unprocessed]

And here’s after.

[voice sample, processed]

Now, I’m still hearing a few clicks in the background, so I’m going to run Dialogue Isolate once more with the same settings to really get the best possible results, given this noisy sample.

Let’s hear the results.

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[voice sample, processed twice]

So here’s the initial state before we did any processing with Dialogue Isolate.

[voice sample, unprocessed]

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And here’s after.

[voice sample, processed]

Increase Audio Volume Izotope Rx 5

For more information, tutorials, and to download your own samples to use with RX 6, head to izotope.com/RX.