Self-Produce a High-Quality Audiobook at Home on a Budget

1. Course Promo: You may think that producing a high quality audio book requires some fancy home studio, expensive microphones or expertise and sound engineering, but actually with a bit of guidance, the process could be straightforward, done on a budget and done from the comfort of your own home. It can also be really fun and a great learning experience to I'm going to show you the process from beginning to end. Leaving no aspect of mystery or you'll need is a computer, a USB microphone, which I'll give you some guidance on on a narrator. But please feel free to borrow a friend or relative with a nice, clear sounding voice. So let's save some money, have some great experiences and produce a really professional sounding audiobook. 2. General Setup: So let's talk about the general set up and what we're going to need. So we're going to use a computer to produce our high quality audio book. In my case, I'm gonna be using my trusty Mac book Air from 2013. Any modern laptop or computer will be absolutely fine. We're not going to need something with a lot of computing power in order to record our audio edited and produced MP three audio files were going to use the computer software audacity. Fortunately, audacity is free to use easy to install on very easy to use. So let me show you how to install audacity. So if you just go to your computer, open up a browser and searching Google for download audacity. The search will bring up our or dusty Web page you can download or dusty for Windows or for Mac. I'm using a Mac right now. Saul. Download the version for Mac download Audacity. Take you too far sub dot com and again, I'm using a Max. I'll download the Mac version, and then when we go to our download's box, we have the Doctor DMG file. When you double click, you'll start to open, and then you'd literally just follow the instructions as you would to instill any other software. The Symbian issues along the way. Usually it's just click next next, and it should install as fine with regard to Windows. Please just follow the steps. With relevance to the Windows operating system, we will need a microphone to record our audiobook. Narrator So I recommend that you buy USB microphone. They're very easy to use and produce high quality audio. An industry standard microphone is the Blue Snowball Mike phone. I've used this personally for years for recording audio books, podcasts on music and for the price of the quality is outstanding. And here it is. So again, you know you can see that is very highly rated. Many reviews high scores. Reasonable price. If you do have the budget available, I also have this microphone again. It's from the company. Blue is the Yeti Nano £100 a remarkable microphone on, then the model above that is the normal Yeti microphone again, very, very well thought of in the community. So this is the one. This is the mike friend that I'm going to be using on. You'll see all of the results that I get from using this relatively cheap microphone. As we can see, this microphone is affordable and easy to acquire. If you want to save money, tried getting it second hand As a word of warning, though I wouldn't recommend buying anything cheaper than this. We a za bare minimum. We need to record good quality audio. Andi. If we don't get that, we can't compensate for that in audacity. So you're welcome to use a cheaper microphone. If you absolutely must just be aware that the audio production will suffer as a result. Ideally, we want to use a pop filter for a microphone as well. This will help to reduce any of those strong, harsh close of sounds, which are difficult to remove in the audio editing stage. Usually, pot filters are very cheap, so you're welcome to go on Amazon and see what is available for the Blue Snowball Mike phone. I'll be using this, which I got from Amazon for a couple of pounds. But if you don't want to pay for a pop filter, I've used his for years, is literally just phone packaging, which came with something that I bought online. It works absolutely fine. Alternatively, you can use a set of women's tights. You can get these which like the arms and the almost kind of like mesh plate that lies in the way of the microphone. These are quite useful and that they keep your distance from the microphone so they can stop you from getting too close to the mic. I like the phone ones, though, personally, and as you can see, they're very cheap. So feel free to look around. Make sure you get one of the correct size. Of course, we're going to need a speaker, so I'm going to assume this is going to be you. But, of course, feel free to borrow a friend or relative who could help you out. With this as an optional item, you may want to use their phones. Personally. I prefer to use thes when I'm editing my audio. I usually find the inbuilt laptop. Speakers aren't very representative of the quality of your recorded audio or representative of what you're audiobook listeners will be hearing when they listen to your book, so I would recommend using some earphones on, and you can just borrow them 3. Introduction to Audacity: So let's set up audacity to use. As I mentioned before, we're going to be using audacity to record an edit on producer MP three files. So once you've installed audacity, feel free to open it and just have a look at the interface that we have right here. Please go through and just look at the individual tours available. But it's quite a simple lout just to highlight that with regard to your input. So this is the mike friend that we choose. You'll be choosing your microphone. If it's the blue snowball, you'll choose Blue Snowball. The only reason I've chosen this one here is because I'm doing a screen capture, so I need some different settings. But you will choose your microphone here recording a mono because that's better. For audible Onda, you'll choose your output, which you know for a Mac we have built in output. Which of the speakers in the laptop again? I just have something chosen here, which is different because I'm doing a screen capture so as a test, if we just go ahead and click record, you can see we're recording a mono track. You can see the audio that is just recording my voice right now. We're gonna click, stop, go back and and click record You can see And we're just listening to basically what I have just recorded Say, if you want to start from a particular point, you click there. Click play. I'm just gonna press space on my key on my keyboard and see the audio that this you want to play a particular part? Maybe you want to know what this is. You just click and drag, click play or space bar on the keyboard, and now and now, so very easy to use. And if I'll just play this too, you'll see the volume going up here and you can see the sorts of volumes were working with . I didn't click record. You can see we're recording a money track. They're so you can see it's just slightly greater than negative 18 decibels, so again, have a play around. It doesn't really get that much more complicated than that on. Once we've recorded some example audio of our audio book, I will guide you through all of the steps for editing the annual thing. Actually, I do want a pension I realize now is If you want to zoom in and look at something, this will be more 11 later. Perhaps, but you can just go in like this and then I'm right clicking to zoom out. 4. Data Management and Version Control: So I just wanted to highlight the importance of data management and version control to make our audio book production process a breeze. I just wanted to lacing ground rules for version control on organization Of all of these files were going to be creating this way. If we make any mistakes, we don't have to redo the whole narration and recording process again, which will save us time. Employing these simple data management strategies will make the audiobook process much quicker and simpler for you. So let's prepare our folders for recording. I'm just going to simply create a new folder and this is gonna be you're audiobook. Then within this folder, we're going to create some new folders. We're gonna go opening credits. These are just gonna be all of the sections for your audio book you folder May, which is gonna go through make new folders for each off the section. I can't write and speak at the same time, we're gonna go through and make new folders for each of the sections, Chapter one, and then just for the purposes of this course closing credits and also, you know, we need to make the the five minutes, Sam Pool, which will be used to sell your audiobook. So what we're gonna do is we go along when we record our audio is we will save our audacity project audio files in the corresponding folder. This will keep things organized. Andi, hopefully keep us on top of everything. Make make everything work a lot smoother. So this concludes Part one, which is our general set up process. If you've had any problems with this or if you have any questions, please do get in touch. My mail is Francis dot grant 344 at gmail dot com. 5. Prepare Audacity: Now let's come onto the process of recording our narrator. Like I said, I'm guessing this will be you. But of course, if you are using someone else, just apply these principles to them. So first of all, let's just prepare ourselves for recording. Let's plug in the microphone. Check the settings of our computer to ensure that our input is set to the microphone. So if you just search for sound, you go to your sound settings on your either Windows or Mac. So we're on a Mac right now. We go to the sound, the sound settings. Here again, you choose your microphone, which is the Blue Snowball. I just have this because again, I'm doing a screen capture now. When we come to record yet, we check your settings here. Everything looks OK. Hit record and just give you a microphone. A whilst recording. Just give you a microphone, a gentle tap, and then you'll see. Because the worry here and I've done this before and it's been really annoying is I've recorded. I was I thought I was recording with the right microphone, but actually, I was recording with the inbuilt laptop microphone. Um, it just wasted so much time. So now before, before I ever make a long recording, I always just confirm that audacity here is definitely recording from the right microphone , not any others that happen to be available in the laptop or anywhere else. 6. Prepare the Narrator/Speaker: So now that our computer is ready for recording, let's get our narrator ready. These steps a critical in creating a clear and engaging audio production. So even though these points may seem trivial, please be sure to take them on board. First of all, let's focus on where we're going to make the recording we don't want to record in large, empty rooms is this is going to give us unwanted reverb in our recording. Small to medium sized rooms with furniture are ideal. This will prevent any echo or reverb in the sound that we capture without microphones. If you do find that you struggle to record a clear sounding audio, pillows and towels placed around the room on against the walls can be useful in absorbing sounds. Now that we have the space for our recording arranged, let's turn our attention to the narrator. Make sure the narrator is sat comfortably on the required book. Text is directly in front of them. They can be sat here for hours speaking, and I can assure you discomfort can be detected in speech. Make sure the microphone is roughly level with the narrator's mouth, and for this I just have the mic phone placed on a book and also make sure that the microphone isn't too close to the narrator. We don't want the mic thrown to be too close. Otherwise, we tend to record quite harsh sons of speech and sounds of the mouth. Conversely, we don't want to be too far away because in the narrator will be too quiet. And then we tend to pick up more background noises. If your computer a laptop has a fan, please direct this away from your microphone. Your Mike phone will record this. Also ensure that we have some water or coffee. Quick toe hand. This just stops on. Narrator from having a dry mouth, and it keeps the vocal cords lubricated. And please make sure that the narrator has regular breaks again. Fatigue and tiredness is audible and will be heard in the recording. A motive. Speaking can be surprisingly tiring on DWI. Don't want fatigue to impact the performance of our narrator. Another tip from me because I've had to redo hours of audio book generation just simply because I recorded at times where I was short of time. Aunt had to rush the recording and at times where I was tired. You can always record tomorrow or later in the day. Don't just record because you're feeling impatient and want to get it done. Because this nearly always results in you needing to redo the recording. It wastes time and is incredibly frustrating, and I can assure you that on efficient process will results in a better outcome. 7. Record High-Quality Narration/Speech: Let's talk about recording high quality speech, so the narrative needs to ensure that they enunciate clearly and articulately. We need to make sure our listeners can understand what we're saying. Don't worry if you need to speak slower than you normally would is the listener can likely speed up playback on their audiobook app. If you're uncertain about how words that pronounced, just do a Google search, there will likely be a sound byte that can help you hear, hear the to hitherto. Now I want to touch of another important element of recording your audio book, which is the timing and tone of the narrator. A monotonous narrator will send our listeners to sleep. We need to provide an engaging and interesting audio experience. Be sure to vary the tone of your voice, leave breaks at different parts of the paragraphs and communicate like there was someone there directly in front of you is you may be seeing when I talk, I gesture a lot. This is a personal thing, and my gestures are intimately tied in with my vocal tone. So even though no one can see me, it does affect how I speak the downside of this is. Sometimes I get closer to the microphone when I'm really into this speaking, which alters the quality of the recorded audio. And sometimes my hand gestures make audible sounds. So therefore, try to restrain your movements on gestures toe only those that can't be recorded by the microphone. If you've never done narration before, spend a bit of time practicing. Record yourself. Listen to yourself back and then repeat the recording. But try and alter different elements of your speech, so generation is more engaging. Finally, please remember to breathe Good narration is reliant on having the air to deliver the speech. Also, don't worry if you need to stop for a few seconds before continuing with the narration. These parts can be very easily removed out when we come. Toe edits our recordings. Similarly, don't worry. If you mess up, you can just start again. Just continue with the previous sentence. Usually, people tend to stop recording when they mess up on start again, but I find this disrupts the flow of narration and could be heard in the recording. Editing recorded audio is very easy with audacity, so even if you sneeze or cough or need to retry one sentence five times, I would rather keep going than restart our narrator 8. The Audible ACX Requirements: one thing I just want to make you familiar with are the audio requirements set by audible for upload. If you just go to Google and you search for a C X audio, submission requirements will take you to the official page. So if you go to the official page, we have some requirements listed and these will make far more sense as we actually work through the course. But just Teoh list them out to you explicitly. Each audiophile must only contain one chapter or section per file with a section header read aloud, which we will do have a running time no longer than 120 minutes for each section, have room tone at the beginning and end and be free of background sounds which we will address. It goes here to talk about the volume range and the maximum volume you can have and also the quality of the MP three. But we will work through all this as we go along. So please become familiar with this re through the entire page and just make sure you're clued in on everything here. But again, if you follow my instructions, all this will be ticked off as we go along 9. The Recording Process Walkthrough: So let's go to the process of recording the narrator. If you want to upload your audiobook toe audible, you need to provide opening and closing credits. These are very short and follow a typical format. So let's begin with these and use them as examples to familiarize you with recording. Okay, so we have what, dusty open. We have a microphone selected in the input mono selected on our output selected. So I'm gonna give you an example of the format of a typical opening credits that would use for Audible For that will use my book. We're gonna hit record on I'll Get Into It. The Talent Hacker's Guide. Practical Strategies to Develop Your Talent for Anything Written and narrated by Francis M . Grant. We hit Stop and then we can listen to that back if we just wanna play from a certain point , we just click the cursor here and hit Play the Talent Hacker's Guide Practical Strategies to develop Your Talent for anything written and narrated by Francis M. Grant. So now let's save our file in the appropriate folder. Now, of course, you would have done this in earlier stage. If you're recording a really long chapter. So safe project and navigate to the relevant folder your audiobook. We were recording the opening credits, and I'm just going to save this as opening credit zero on and just put raw audio. We're going to say that now. This is the important part that I mentioned earlier about data management and version control. We wanna have this completely unedited to go back to in case anything gets wrong. So now what I'm actually going to do is save this project again again in the right folder opening credits. And I was gonna call this opening credit zero to and it's it audio. Okay, and now let's move on to our closing credits in terms of the former, it's very similar to the opening credits. I'll show you now. So again we're in audacity or hit record. Thank you very much for listening to The Ton Hacker's Guide Practical Strategies to Develop Your Talent for anything Written and narrated by Francis M. Grant. If you'd like more talent hacker resources, please go to www dot talent hacker blawg dot com. Well, listen to that back. Thank you very much for listening to the Ton Hacker's Guide Practical Strategies to Develop your talent for anything. Written and narrated by Francis M. Grant. If you would like more talent hacker resources, please go to www dot talent hacker blawg dot com. Okay, perfect. And now we'll save that as a raw audio file. Now that we've recorded the audio from opening and closing credits, let's record a chapter paragraph to use as an example to edit in the next part of this course. When I make this recording, I will make some intentional mistakes. I'm doing this so that I can show you. It is far more efficient to continue recording instead of stopping and starting the recording, and so that I can show you later on that these mistakes are really easy to edit out. So back in audacity, I hit record introduction. Why hack a talent? Many people aspire to be talented at something. They aspire to play a musical instrument so that they can perform their favorite songs or write their own compositions. Do they wish to command a different language so that they can communicate with others in their own tongue or engage more with culture? Perhaps they enjoy a particular sport and desire to take their performance the next level, maybe within their career, they desire to expand their skill, set to grow professionally or shoot for a bigger position. There are many circumstances in life where we want to or are required to possess a strong ability in a given discipline. But I've always felt that many of us and ever quite given the right tours to break apart of discipline and understand how to develop their talent for it. So I hope you can see in these examples that I made sure to breathe properly, pronounce my words clearly, vary my vocal tone and emphasize certain parts of the paragraphs. If you have any questions on this part of the course, please get in touch with me again. It's my email. Is Francis not ground 344 at gmail dot com. 10. Editing the Audio: So now let's editor Rodeo and make it sound really professional. So to begin with this, we saw in the a C X submission requirements. We want tohave some some background noise from room noise, just the beginning of a couple of seconds of no speech. So we have some excess time right here. I'll just select that by clicking and dragging and then pressing delete for a music major one a bit more. So again, I'll click and drag and select some more time and remove that and I do the same at the end . So this is just the opening credits. You know, it wasn't a lot of audio, but sometimes if you've been reading from a long chapter, you'll know there's different places where you may start where you coughed. You know, just scroll through the audio and you can select different segments by just clicking and dragging and say, we want to remove this for whatever reason, I was gonna press space bar to play that the talent hackers got you know, say we didn't want that, For example, you you'd select this audio and just press delete on you get rid of it, just like that. So just go through and kind of do some quality control and prune out the bits that you know you don't want there. So now let's apply some compression to our audio. What this would do is make the audio less variable will make the quieter parts the quietest speech louder and the louder parts of speech quieter. So I'm going to select the entire track. Either you could just press a control A or command A on a Mac to select everything. We could just click here. So if selected, the entire track and we'll go to effect compressor so you you'll want to use settings along these lines. Threshold Negative 19 decibels. Noise floor Negative 40 ratio took 2.5 to 1. Attack time 1.8 and release time. 11.1 That is, until on to compress based on Pick on peaks is ticked. You click OK. You'll immediately see here that some of these peaks have now been brought up, and some of the volumes are louder. The talent Hacker's guide. There we go, and you can also probably hear a bit of our background noise that has been brought up there . But we can remove this with some microphones at it particularly feel this is the case for my recording. But with some microphones, this still may be quite quiet. And if you did want to make that even louder, you could click. You could select the entire track as before, go to effect and normalize it. So go down to the normal Isar, which is here, used the settings removed DC offset tick normalized peak amplitude too negative. One decibels tick, you click. OK, and then you can see everything has been brought up. However, I don't feel the need to do that with my recording, as I feel that it's already loud enough and you can see that just by where this line is. But eso let's just play that I get actually the talent hackers guy. Exactly. So that is quite loud and actually some of these peaks I'd like this order to be a bit more consistent. So for that I'm going to select all of the audio go to effect on choose thier limiter. We're gonna set a hard limit. These are set to zero. This is the This is the limit that we want to set and we know that our kind of peaks were getting too negative. Six. Some was gonna move that, too. Let's try eight hold Is it 10 milliseconds and we'll click? OK, and you can see some of those peaks have just been brought in our click undo so you can see that again. So that's what it was before. Edit, redo, limiter and you can see that's been brought in. So let's have a listen to that. The talent Hacker's Guide. Practical strategies to develop Good. That's what I'm looking for, so far clearer. But that background noise is starting to bother me a bit. So to resolve this, what we're gonna do is actually just select a bit of that background noise. You can hear it here, just all of that noise there that he's saying that noise from me breathing. We want to get rid of that so we'll shoot specifically choose that noise. They're not the entire track, just that segment of audio and go to effect when it's used noise reduction and what we'll do is we'll actually get the noise profile and analyze. This will set a noise reduction to these air quite heavy settings the's a quite aggressive settings. And if you're going to use this in a different context, I wouldn't use such high settings. But for here, I will. No, it's reduction. 30 decibels and sensitivity. 20 frequency smoothing in nine and we've chosen Reduce. Sam's gonna click, Get noise Profile. Nothing has changed. What you have to do is now select the entire audio track. Go effect. Repeat noise reduction, which is just control. A command are on a Mac. He can see there that we've lost some of this noise of the beginning. Let's have it s so let's have a listen to that. Okay, Much better. And that's has gone on. Let's just listen to actual speech. The Talent Hacker's Guide, Practical strategies to develop your talent for anything written and okay. Brilliant 11. Optional Audio Editing Steps: Now we come to subjective part in our audio editing, which is about breath removal. Personally, I like to keep breaths from the narrator. In the recording, I find this sounds more natural and links together different sentences. I also find that it gives him space in our narration for the listener. However, I do find loud breathing distracting, so I'll show you how to address this. Now. Now we've already been editing this audio, and I know that there's there's just one breath in the short audio segment and it was here . So for me, that's fine. I mean, I wouldn't remove that. I don't find it too true civil distracting from the speech. However, if you do have a long seven segment of audio and you do want to reduce all of the breaths, let me show you the way to do this. So the way we go about this and audacity is we use on effect called the Noise gate. So if you select all of the audio, you go to effect and the noise gate is just here. However, the noise gate isn't installed in all copies of audacity. When I first installed a dusty I had to manually install the noise gate, and I'll show you how to do that if things setting is not here for you. So let's just get to a browser and search for Nyquist Noise Gate plug in. So here's the page we need, and I'm just going to jump to the noise gate by clicking here. So here's where you can download lots of different plug ins for audacity. Maybe in the future you will want to explore more. But for now, let's just download the noise gate. Soon after, go to my downloads folder, you can see the noise gate plug in his downloaded here. Now, we need to move this file, actually two or dusty so we can use this plug in in audacity. So if you click on applications Goto audacity Right click and put show package contents. Clinton contents go to plug ins. You can see here all of my plug ins and in fact, actually concede there I but the noise get in there recently. So what you want to do is download this noise, get plug in and transfer it to your plug ins. Now when you go back to order, see, it's we're not quite there yet. Click effect. Add remove plug ins and being that we've moved the noise gate plug in to that or dusty folder. It should appear here. So just type end to go to the plug ins beating with n noise Gate. And then, if it's not enabled, you want to click enable Mine is already sort of need to be click enable. Okay, and then it's available for us to use. So supply the plug in. We want to see how loud our breath is here, so I just select it. He's in click and drag and play that and you can see the volume was between negative 42 negative 36 decibels. So when we go effect noise gate, we would set that as a threshold here. So let's say negative 36. These settings keep all the same. So select function gate thanks. Their tracks cut a filter no gay frequencies above zero level reduction. To get to 12 leave the attack and delay and then just click. OK, so you can see here Now there's made breath much quieter in volume mint for anything written and now and there you go on. Of course, you don't need to just apply it to one section as I did. You can apply it to the entire audio track by simply selecting the entire audio track and then clicking Effect Noise gate. And this is a really useful way of removing breaths from, you know, many minutes of audio automatically as another optional stage. You may wish to either boost the base or reduce the trouble or boost the trouble depending on the frequency of your voice. So what we can do here is select part of our speech. Some just gonna get a click and drag segment of speech, go to analyze Andi, choose plot spectrum. He can see that my voice predominantly lies within the base frequencies. For example, if I wanted to reduce some of that bass in my voice and add some trouble, you could select the entire track click effect on go to Equalization and then choose whatever setting we want. Either we can do that manually and play with the trouble frequencies up down here, or, you know, as an example, reduce some of the base frequencies down here. We also have presets, so there's trouble boost trouble coats just out of interest. I'm gonna choose this base card and let's see how it sounds. Talent Hacker's Guide. It sounds horrible, big. There you go. It's it's feed to play with and change your voice as you see fit here. Go with clarity of speech. Know what you prefer? Like, for example, you you may want You may think your voice sounds better with more base, but really, what you want to go for is clarity on the listening experience For the people who are gonna be listening to your audio book, finally, is another optional stage, which you may need to do on your audio. You may want to reduce the harshness of close if speech sounds. If you've been using the blues Noble Mick and you haven't Bean to close the microphone, this probably won't be a problem. And as we've spoken about the pop filter will reduce these types of sounds. But say, for example, we did have, you know, a P sound. That was particularly harsh, and we did want to reduce that p sound. Um, this isn't harsh, but say this is it here. Really? What want to do is go to effect again reduced the harshness of that by choosing the limiter and reducing the volume to an appropriate volume. So, for example, we could me that, too. I don't know around negative nine, and you can see that reduces the peak. So again, if you do have any sounds which are particularly harsh and distracting, just select that particular part and use the limiter to reduce the volume of that and the intensity of that sound. 12. Exporting the Audio to mp3: So now after this audio editing process, a matter a point where I'm really happy with my recorded audio. And I want export this to an MP three file ready for upload. So just click file export as MP three. Where during the opening credit. So I say this in the opening credits folder Far type MP, three bit rate motors, constant qualities 192 thes adjust. The requirements are specified by audible and click safe. Here. You can enter whatever you want. Your name, track title as such and to whatever you want. Then click. OK, now when we go to a folder, will see that I MP three file is here. We're just open that up. The Talent Hacker's Guide Practical Strategies to Develop Your Talent for anything Written and narrated by Francis M. Grant And there you go 13. Editing the Audio (Walkthrough): Okay, so we went through the whole audio editing process with our opening credits, and that was quite a short piece of audio. And I wanted to go through something which was a bit longer. So as you may recall, we recorded the introduction. However, as I always recommend, you need to keep a version unedited available few in case anything goes wrong. So let's just save, uh, say this again as introduction to and it's It's audio and this is the version we're going to be working on. Let me just play this again to you, to remind you of what it was. Introduction. Why hack a talent? Many people aspire to be talented at something I could already see here. There's some kind of loud sound artifacts. Let's just have a listen to those write their own compositions, do you? They wish to command the diff. Okay, so that was the part where I messed up. So first of all, before we start, you know, going through when editing all this audio as a recommend, just remove some excess Xs sound delete to remove that. That's good. I would do the same at the end, so we have just a couple of seconds of room noise. And then this is the part where I messed up and I'm just gonna literally drag, click and drag the whole thing and press delete. Let's listen to that positions they wish to commanded. Yes, it is still a bit of background noise, but that should be taken out in the noise reduction stage one which is to apply our compressor so click or or command a than effect on. We go to the compressor, keep our settings as we did before and I'll click. OK, so we can see a lot of those sounds have been brought up. Let's have a listen introduction. Why Hack a talent? Okay, so the volume is much louder and more consistent, so I feel this has already loud enough. But as I said before, if your particular recording is not again, you can all always select the track go to effect on choose the normalize feature. So now I just want to bring in some of these peaks. You can see some of these here are a bit loud in comparison to the rest of the audio, so I'm just gonna ply the limiter selectable effect limiter with me. That too. This is always wrong. We can just select, undo and change. It will apply the limited with these settings. Okay, that looks about good. You can see that brought than it that in there I'll just go at it. Undo limited, so you can see at it. Redux limiter. Let's have a listen. Many people aspire to be talented at something great. Okay, so there's that background noise that hissing, which is bothering me a bit. And now let's apply the noise reduction. So I'm just going to select some of this background noise at the beginning. Click effect Noise reduction. So this is set 20 decibels. And since 50 10 would just see how that works, get noise profile, select the entire track and then effect repeat noise reduction. Let's have a listen. Introduction. Perfect. Why hack a talent? And there's the bit where I messed up where I want to. Just listen to that again. Let's have a listen here. Their own compositions. They wish to command that. Still a bit of feedback there. Let's have a listen. Okay, so I want to get rid of that. But I do still like this space. I'm just gonna apply the noise reduction again. Here. Effect noise reduction, get noise profile. Repeat noise reduction. And I said, Listen, I was all right. Their own compositions. They wish to command a different language. Yeah, so again, Barely audible. So now we're at a point where if you do not want to keep your breaths in, we can get rid of those. I just wanna have a listen to see what they like more with culture. Perhaps they enjoy. So that kind of loud performance, the next level, maybe within Yeah. I mean, they're kind of loud, but they don't really bother me too much. I'm just going to select this just visually. Looks like the loudest one. I just want to see how allowed that gets. So it's between negative 30 and negative 24. So I would personally, I'd probably keep these all in. But just for the sake of this tutorial, I will show you how to remove all of the breaths in the entire track. So again, that was between. That was between negative 30 and negative. 24. Let's select the entire track and go effect noise gate and will set the noise gate to its already at negative 25. We'll see how that looks. Yeah, and you can see that was immediately brought down. So let's have a listen ability in a given discipline. But I've always felt them so is much quieter, not completely gone. But that's fine for me. If you did want to completely get rid of that, you could just set a more aggressive noise gate before it was at what, Negative. 25. You could sit that even lower eso completely get rid of it. So I'm happy with this. That save it to an MP three file file export as MP three, it's in our introductions folder again. Settings as before. Artist name. We'll just put me. Nope. Of course. Okay, so now exporting his are folder introductions folder. That's our raw audio project from audacity. And this is our edit storia. And this is our MP three file here. So let's just play that and give that a listen. Introduction. Why Hack a talent? Many people aspire to be talented at something and there you go 14. Support with Audacity: If you do want to explore or dusty more on its features, which I recommend, you do feel free just to have a play around. I mean, there's plenty to explore. You can do different things. Um, and it will really just give you more power to do whatever you want with your audio. One thing I do recommend is going online and checking out the audacity wicky home page searched through. If you have any issues, I'm sure you'll find a resolution here or just use Google. 15. Course Wrap Up: So now we've covered all of the elements which lead to creating Ah, high quality audio book. I really hope you've enjoyed this and that you found this course useful. If you have, please leave a review or some feedback on this website. Please tell your friends about it. And of course, please share your experiences with me. I would love to hear from you. If you like to hear more from me, you can find me at www dot Town Hacker Block. Don't come overall. I hope you enjoy the experience of making your own audiobook on. I wish you lots of success.