It’s interesting that I’m revisiting this discussion several years later, but I yet still mostly agree with myself.
[*]Executive Producer role: a person committed to the mission of librivox. She should have good ears and a business sense and a solid relationship to our user base. Probably would be a double roll with Admins.
[*]Project producers (Moderators) receives direction and suggestions for how to organize a project to be most effective. They give final feedback to the mastering engineer before a project is published. The coordinate with volunteer talent (readers) to gather the scripts recorded.
[*]Mastering engineer - in music production, the mastering engineer receives a package of mixed audio files from the recording engineer. She then uses high-grade equipment and detailed tweaks to make all of the albums flow together into a cohesive album that can be enjoyed in the car while driving, relaxing at home, played to a classroom with professional audio equipment, or played from an iPhone into Airpods. We don’t know the circumstances of audience, but we can put an effort forth to maximize the quality of the projects that we are releasing. Part of this will be accomplished through the leadership of talented mastering engineers, and the rest through the standards that they agree on. The Librivox Lead Mastering Engineer would write the production standards for Librivox projects; to ensure the best quality according to industry best practices, give the readers clear guidance to help record awesomeness, and guide the other Editors/Masters.
[*]Editor - mentors readers without much technical background to help them gain the best quality from their available tools. Does light editing to maximize the quality of that recording or requests a replacement recording if it’s unusable.
[*]Masterer - Edits all of the individual readings together into a cohesive project, ready to be distributed as a podcast or other such formats that our users need.
Loudness standards. The industry has migrated to LUFS as a standard way to characterize loudness. All of the DAWS should have support for LUFS metering now. Though librivox is a volunteer organization, our listeners also listen to commercial and your volunteer editors likely do projects outside of librivox where industry norms are expected.
(From:
https://www.edmprod.com/lufs/)
Service Loudness Target
Spotify -14 LUFS
Soundcloud No loudness normalization
Apple Music -16 LUFS
YouTube -14 LUFS
Amazon -11 LUFS
Beatport/DJ Stores Recommended -6 to -9 LUFS