A Good Structure Question - Audiobook Narration

[Max Arwood]

I remembers one last things that should help.  If you line up your tracks and rewind for the next take, there is no way to make areas in the recording to go back to and edit.  Nugen is a more pro site. Their plugins are super 
 

https://nugenaudio.com/jotter

Waves WLM plus is a great option if you could find it for $29 I it has great LUFS meter,(long term and short term LUFS  It also includes a true peak limiters and a dynamic range section. It is very good especially if you could find it for $29. You would have to wait till the next sale. They should have one starting pretty soon lol!!

Oh wow I found it on sale!

https://www.waves.com/plugins/wlm-loudness-meter

(It’s almost always on sale) lol 😂 

[John Vere]

But only the You Lean meter will analyze a whole file all at once in seconds.  All other meters are in real time so you have to play a whole track/ song/movie/mp3 file to get your reading.  
Best $50 I ever spent.  And under testing a bunch of meters they all seem equally accurate as far as LUFS and RMS go, but the You Lean has better peak detection. 
And you use it’s read out to book mark peaks. It leaves a red dot. This speeds up the task of manually removing peaks. 
Same with limiters I tested at least 10 and the Loud Max was the most accurate.
It’s easy to test limiters and meters. Set the limiter at -1.0 and put a few loudness meters after the limiter in the bin.  Start turning up the Gain and observe.  

[CJ8073]

Mettelus - Okay, so basically, the knee is kind of where it looks either sharp or smooth at the bend area where the compressor kicks in.  This, I'm sure, makes slight/large variances to different instruments/sounds.  The larger the knee integer the smoother the bend, the smaller the integer the sharper the bend.  As far as sound, I imagine this elongates or shortens the way the compressor kicks in, then.  "we all have to learn at some point... (and more often doing)" ... lol, I think what I am going to do is try to find some musical instruments I can throw in Cakewalk and just mess around for fun, just to see what exactly everything does!  I messed with some of the settings on my vocal file, but when I got to the knee I couldn't tell a whole lot.  I think it's just that I'm not sure what to listen for.  And perhaps for what I'm doing it doesn't matter much, but I find the whole thing so fascinating.. lol.  So, for what you do, do you normalize, EQ, then compress?  In that order?  And from what you are saying, there seems to be a great deal to be said for preference and everything is subjective, since there is no right or wrong to a lot of it.  As far as the patch point, I might just record something to mess around with and play around with that and see how it works and if it would work for me, I am very interested to learn about it.

 

Max - 

9 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

I remembers one last things that should help.  If you line up your tracks and rewind for the next take, there is no way to make areas in the recording to go back to and edit.

  I was a little confused about this.... what do you mean, "if you line up your tracks and rewind for the next take..."?  I was trying to think of what you meant because it seems like something that would be useful since it had to do with editing, but I couldn't picture what you meant.  I am always looking for ways to make my editing a little faster.  I've tried recording then going back to listen to the whole thing, but this takes.... foorreevveerr.  For my reading it keeps me in the moment a little better, but going back through takes forever.  I don't have a dog clicker to mark as I go, so I make a little click noise myself for it, but it still takes so long to go through the whole thing, plus I seem to mess up more.  So, I've what I've been doing recording a section, coming to a sort of pre-determined stopping point (usually at a dialogue change or between paragraphs) and editing a smaller portion as I go, this way by the end it's been mostly edited and going through it isn't as difficult.  I take longer to record, but save a little time on editing.  I've finally set up  some better shortcut keys that have helped me to be faster, too, since now I don't have to keep looking down at my keyboard every couple of seconds.

I checked out both the WLM and the Jotter plugins that you have suggested.  Oohh... I like them both!  Okay, kinda shallow, I know, but I really like the UI scheme of the WLM, as well.  I know they probably have features in them that are way above my level of necessity, but I do really like them!  I like how simple the WLM seems to be to use.  Now I gotta figure out the RMS - LUFS conversion, if there is one.  I read and watched videos talking about both and I know that one has to do with Root Mean Square of the actual signal and one has to do with the perceived loudness.. I think.  But, I need to learn more to understand better.  As far as getting the plugins, for now I am going to bookmark these and as soon as I can afford a couple of these, I'm going to get them.  

Speaking of plugins, JohnnyV - 

I did not realize the YouLean that is for purchase will analyze the whole audio file at once.  I would find this very useful, indeed!  and I will also bookmark this for a later purchase.  So, do you have to export the file first and then drag that into the YouLean meter?  Or, does it analyze it within Cakewalk?  YouLean meter (the free version) was one of the first meters I downloaded, but I had no idea what I was looking at back then.  I still don't understand everything, but I'm learning.  So many videos of ProTools showed people knowing exactly what their RMS value was within the software itself; I was looking for something like that for Cakewalk, but couldn't find anything.  Like you said, every meter I found was a "live" meter and yes, I would have to run the whole track.  I finally found dpMeter5 and instead of running through the whole file I just let it go for roughly 3-5 minutes in different places and kind of mentally average the RMS and most of the time, I've gotten a little better and predicting where it's going to wind up by doing it this way.  (I've done this now on three tracks since having first started this discussion post and implementing some of the ideas that I have read on here)  However, something that is more instant would be nice.  As far as peaks, yeah, that would be nice too, to instantly see the peaks.  When I listen to my audio after recording and while double checking for text errors, I also listen for evenness and whistliness/plosives that may come across uncomplimentary and I use the Clip Gain to correct it manually.  I basically split around the offensive section, hold control and move up/down to fix the issue. 

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So, below are my two files.  The first is raw and the second is the final after processing.  Just wanted to get some second opinions on quality.  I know it's not professional, but for what I can do with my current knowledge, I can make necessary changes, if needed.  Thanks!

 

[mettelus]

Compressors are one of the most often used musical tools, so I want to be sure I am not trying to oversimplify them. It is important that they are understood.

Thank you for posting those files. I sent you a PM, and can discuss that either there or here (your preference), but I tried to keep the simplest FX chain possible in what I did with your original.

[Max Arwood]

Shortcuts -

I have used cakewalk shortcuts to reprogram program Markers menu which is = Press Alt+Shift+4  to  = Shift+m

Adding Markers is by pressing the key m

Markers are a great way to move very quickly through a long recording. While you are recording, you can press the letter "m". What happens is that Cakewalk will place a marker at the exact point when you press "m". The timeline ruler will have a marker titled A1. When you press m again, you will get another titled A2, etc. You can use the marker menu pull down (JPG Markers Dialogue) to immediately jump to that time. The markers are stored and can be managed by the key combination of Alt+Shift+4 or reprogram to "Shift"+"m".  Either way, you get the Markers menu (JPG Markers Menu) You can erase and rename markers from here. You can also use this menu to move between markers by simply clicking the name. Once you have finished getting the markers learned, there is also arranger tracks. Arranger tracks kind of serve some of the same functions but also add some other features.

 

EDIT->I left out this part talking about Jotter - Jotter allows  location points in audio without the need for a marker track. (The marker track is free LOL!)

Edited September 2, 2023 by Max Arwood