How to record Adiobooks myself?

January 5, 2024 11:11 PM

I want to publish my books as audiobooks. I need advice about recording equipment, software, and work flow.

I live in a small house with budgies 🦜so one concern is, will I need to make a sound booth?

What kind of microphone?

Can I use Reaper or is there software that's more suitable for recording narration? For example, maybe people who record podcasts use something customised for that kind of thing?

How much editing / mastering is needed?

Any tips much appreciated.

(I'm not looking for advice on the publishing side of things right now)

posted by Zumbador to Technology (5 answers total)

I don't know the answer to most of your questions, but I wanted to suggest that your local public library may have a sound booth and/or recording equipment. Depending on how many books you have it may be more cost and time efficient to use those than to buy/build/set up your own. If they do have equipment, they might also have training and likely have software. You could even use their setup for your first book and then once you're familiar with it it would be easier to set up your own.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 12:41 AM on January 6 [3 favorites]

Here are some links I've accumulated about creating a home recording space. The cheapest path is to record in a closet full of clothes to eliminate echoes. You can get creative with adding cushions or moving blankets to further isolate outside sound, but true soundproofing quickly gets expensive. Your goal is a quiet noise floor around -60dB. Highly recommend taking at least one class specifically on audiobook narration, this will also help with figuring out workflow.

Starting out, you can get your toes wet with a USB mic like the Blue Yeti, but a better setup is a XLR mic connected to an audio interface which then connects to your computer. A decent XLR mic will run $100 - $500. I started out with the $100 Behrenger B-1 and had no complaints. Audio interface runs another $100 - $300, lots of ppl use the Focusrite Scarlett models.

Use free editing software starting out, like Audacity. Dabble with other DAW software (Reaper, Audition, OcenAudio, TwistedWave) until one clicks for you. Find a class on audio editing if you're not already proficient, there's lots of on-demand ones online. Plan on 2-4 hours of editing for every hour of finished audio. Finally, a decent set of wired headphones is essential, minimum $100, a popular choice is the Sony MDR-7506. Hope this helps!
posted by sapere aude at 11:45 AM on January 6 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I just put up a video for a friend, and am now getting bombarded by people telling me I need to get into VO professionally, so I've been looking into this exact sort of question for a while now. Here's my notes from the past couple months:

1. Modern cardioid-pattern USB mics are pretty good, although pro houses get snobby and insist you have an XLR mic and a separate USB interface. If you're doing this yourself, the Sennheiser Profile seems to be the best all-in-one out there right now (complete with a headphone jack to let you monitor how you'll sound). But even a cheap Snowball or Yeti or whatever will do the job if you record in a nice room and with good mic discipline (more on those below).
2. You may not need a sound booth. There are two problems you will have: sound coming in from outside, and your own voice echoing off the walls. The first problem is one you'll need to solve yourself, but the second one is commonly solved by building pillow-forts and hanging moving blankets behind you. A cardioid mic rejects sound behind it pretty well, so you may find that behind you and beside/above you are the problem areas. Lots of folks do good work from walk-in closets!
3. Audacity is absolutely good enough. But if you're recording a long piece, get to know the "punch-and-roll" workflow. If you stop recording, click on a moment right before you messed up, and hit a key (usually shift-D, but you can configure it), Audacity will play the last 5s or so of "good" audio, and cut immediately to recording, so you can re-read the last bit and hit the decks running. This will save you weeks' worth of post-production editing trying to find mistakes and stitch things together.
4. Modern audacity has good live plugins now, so you can pop a de-esser or EQ or compressor on, without changing the files. You can experiment better! There are some good tutorials on EQ for voiceover on youtube, but by and large it's "cut off everything below like 65Hz and above like 18kHz, maybe knock a decibel or two out of the 300-600Hz range where it sounds echoey, and explore in the 80-250Hz range to see if there are any annoying specific frequencies to 'notch out'".
5. That said, you may find it easier at the end of your project to just save a copy and use the destructive "loudness normalise" stuff to meet whatever standards your publisher wants (Amazon's standard is RMS between -22 and -18, peaks below -3)
6. Read slowly and casually. Listen to some audiobooks to find what you like, and copy their diction. A lot of folks on The Blue complain about video or audio files explaining what could be text, and that's partly because we can mostly read at 3x the speed we speak/listen. Just let yourself build a world with your voice, instead of worrying about info-dumping efficiently, and it will sound good.
7. Cardioid mics pick up a lot of booming bass the closer you get, but they also pick up a lot of breaths and mouth clicks and hissing sounds. Experiment with distance and angle. You'll want a pop filter, but even without one you can often get away with aiming the mic at your throat or sinuses (depending on the frequencies you want to accentuate, mostly), and letting the main breath of your voice go past it diagonally.

posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:33 AM on January 7 [7 favorites]

Some follow-up thoughts:

I never learned to drive, but some folks say that the sound isolation and acoustics of most car interiors makes them great places to record. Bonus is you can probably drive out somewhere without exterior noise sources. But even your own parking spot at home might be quieter than your parlour, if you have birds.

The Sennheiser Profile USB microphone is one of those "either you love it to death or think it's mediocre rubbish" objects. It has decent plosive rejection (removing the need for a pop filter in some cases), has a good gain knob (which is the primary reason people insist on an external audio interface), is definitely a high-quality Sennheiser cartridge (good noise floor, frequency response, blah blah blah), and has the monitor port (the second reason people insist on the interface). I recommend it to beginners as it's not that much more than common USB mics, and really outshines the category. It also Just Works as a Normal USB Audio Device, with no special software needed: you could plug it into your phone and just use the built-in audio recording app, relying on the in-mic features to get a good recording.

But if you're hyper-optimising, you can definitely find lots of fun toys to research for separate XLR mics and interfaces! I'm curious to try a supercardioid shotgun mic at some point, if this all works out for me.

The monitors are an important part of gauging your performance. You could listen via the audio port of your laptop, but by that time your audio data have gone through the CPU of your computer and been Computed, which takes time. If you want to invent an effective brain-scrambler, just make a device that repeats people's words a half-second after they say them. The port in the interface/mic will give you zero-latency feedback on how you sound, similar to old land-line telephones (but better). This is especially helpful once you get into your groove on the punch-and-roll edit flow.

For headphones, I use the 80-ohm Beyerdynamics DT770 Pros. They're a staple at the BBC, partly because they're completely maintainable: you could probably buy replacement parts from repair warehouses and construct your own from a kit, if you needed. Also the stock earpads are velour instead of polyurethane-coated foam: I keep my hair shaved to stubble most of the time, and in a few days I managed to sandpaper three years' worth of wear into the Sennheiser HD380 Pros my family bought for our electric piano. I'm still hoovering flakes of black plastic dandruff up from that, and vowed to make all our headphones velour from now on.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:50 AM on January 8 [2 favorites]

Transom is a project that aims to help people learn how to record and broadcast audio stories -- including both journalism and fiction -- and it's got lots of great tips and resources. A few good links:
- Setting up a small recording studio
- The Basics
- Voice recording in the home studio (includes tips and sound samples demonstrating several affordable home setups)
- P-Pops and Other Plosives
- And a whole archive of techniques
posted by ourobouros at 3:25 PM on January 8 [3 favorites]