Yarpeaudio's Kitchen

Hello! Here you can get some insights or tips-n-tricks about the audiobook engineering process.

Cues for your engineer

If you are an indie author, who narrates own books, or narrator, who’s working with outsourced audio engineer, please don’t forget to give your engineer clear sonic and visual cues to work with…

What am I talking about? When you make a false start or an error (almost inevitable both), make it clearly marked! Snap your fingers, cough, clap your hands, whatever… Audio engineer uses these sonic (and visual! see screenshot) cues to speedup the editing process. Such a simple thing speeds up the editing process by two times! If you pay your engineer on a hourly basis, it’s — literally […] Read more

Tailored editing

I have plenty of projects where I am asked to clean up and master a track combined of different snippets (for example, an interview or an ad footage taken in different places with different acoustic and noise floor conditions, and then tied up).

In such a cases you can’t just pass your track through Noise Reduction automatic module. These cases require much more neat and individual approach. You have to teach your De-Noiser (De-Reverb module as well) every time you see a new chunk. Then these fragments should be levelled and EQ-ed to make a feeling of consistency.

That’s why I offer a bespoke audio […] Read more

Automatic audio processing

Recently my client gave me one of his podcast recordings which he has processed through online audio processing service. While i had no claims about loudness levelling and normalization in this file, I noticed almost intact plosives (low frequency spikes — usually below 100 Hz, — that sound very unpleasant and annoying).

Here’s my little analysis.
Tool: iZotope RX6 (industry standard in Audio Restoration realm).

Working with loudness

Levelling and normalization — good job. On the second screenshot you can see the declining trend. In the second part of the file speaker has increased his intonations and subjectively sounded louder. So it was a correct job.