genep wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2021, 11:02 am
LCaulkins wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2021, 9:34 am
Hello, Gene!
I'm glad you mentioned the suite - it was quite cool to listen to it in the background while I was proofing your recording.
Your reading is fantastic - another great volunteer addition to LibriVox.
There are two places where the volume needs to be adjusted. It's an easy edit, and if you are using Audacity (the only software I'm familiar with), here's how to do that:
- Open the recording, and zoom in on the track until you can see the half-second tick marks.
The intro is far louder than the story, so let's bring those decibels down:
- Drag the mouse over the section from the beginning through 29.5 to highlight that portion of the track.
- From the Effects drop-down menu, select Amplify
- Type -5 in the top box (ignore everything else) The minus sign tells it to adjust volume down.
- Click OK
And then there is one spot inside the story where the volume is significantly lower than the rest, so let's bring those decibels up:
- Drag the mouse over the section from 2:26 to 2:42 to highlight that portion of the track.
- From the Effects drop-down menu, select Amplify
- Type 7 in the top box (ignore everything else)
- Click OK
Now you can re-export the file to mp3 and upload the new file the same way you did the first time. Don't forget to post again.
Thanks for the feedback and glad you liked it. I recorded the story bc this is my favorite piece of music. Now to questions. I use Audacity, so thanks again. I will correct whatever is needed but would like to understand it, first. Yeah, I know, that's a pain. Really not just being argumentative.
You indicate the intro is louder than the rest and you are certainly more experienced. My wave form doesn't indicate that. Also, you indicate to select from intro to 29.5.That looks like the entire piece. Should it be? Happy to fix it, just don't know where.
On my track 2:26-2:42 is relative silence between phrases, so should be low. Am I reading the numbers wrong?
FYI, when I did an ACX check, it was all good. Hmmmm, now I remember something about a librivox check.....Just found it and ran it. Says I passed. So now, this newbie is really confused.
Thanks for helping me learn all this.
G
I don't mind your questions at all.
You don't come off as argumentative. I remember extremely well how bewildering everything seemed to me when I was a "young" reader here, and I only thought you sounded like it wasn't clear yet for you. It does all clear up as you go along.
Yes, Checker passes the recording - but when you know that it checks a file by taking little samplings throughout, rather than evaluating every bit of the track, it becomes clear how a track passes the overall check, but can still have spots in it that are "wonky." I didn't know that about Checker until I'd done dozens of recordings.
And that's why a fresh ear listening to the whole recording for us is a valuable thing, rather than just running a file through Checker and saying, oh good! This is finished.
For the time stamps I listed - I should have put :29.5 for the ending of the first one (so, you'd highlight the first 29 and a half seconds of the recording, which is the entire intro). Sorry about that forgotten semi-colon - yeah, 29 minutes would be about the entire track!
If your track is zoomed in until you can see the tick marks for the half-seconds, you'll be able to see visually that the sound waves are much larger in this first stretch than they are where the story starts. And then you'll also see that in the stretch starting at 2 minutes, 26 seconds, the waves are super small. In both of those areas, when listening to the recording, you get abrupt and significant changes in volume that are disruptive to your reading.
I love that it is so easy for us to fix the volume so you'd never know those existed before, and nothing has to be re-recorded to do so.
Let me know if I still haven't cleared it up for you. I'm not always the best at that.
