 This video is going to be unlike any other video on YouTube where you're going to learn exactly how to narrate an audiobook yourself that you could then put on Audible. So we're going to tell you exactly what microphone you need, the microphone settings, all the requirements that ACX requires you to pass so that your audiobook will actually get accepted to Audible and literally just everything you need to know. How to edit your audiobook, the software to use, literally everything. So if you want to learn how to narrate your audiobook yourself for Audible then you need to watch this entire video. This is a full course of one video, let's just get straight to it, fade to black. What is up everyone and welcome to this lesson where we will be showing you exactly how to narrate your audiobook yourself. More specifically, here's a laundry list of everything we'll be discussing. This could all be paraphrased into basically everything you need to know. To narrate for ACX so that they accept it and there's no questions asked along the way. So let's get into it. As we have said multiple times before, we do not recommend people to narrate their own audiobooks themselves unless you're a professional voice actor with a great voice that fits your audiobook. For example us, we could never. Why would anyone listen to an audiobook without a voice actor? If you're not a voice actor just please don't, I just want you to have the most success, don't do it. Because in most cases you are going to lose money by narrating the audiobook yourself. People want a high quality, good narrated audiobook. So unless you can provide that, don't do it. But some of you do have great voices. But if you're okay with that then by all means go for it. This lesson is specifically made for you. Just needed to provide that disclaimer. There's nothing wrong with narrating your audiobook yourself. We are just in the business of making the most money from our audiobooks. Therefore we hire professional narrators. Now we are going to teach you everything you need to know about narrating your own audiobook. I already said this. And to learn how to be a good narrator watch the previous lesson in this course about the five elements of a high quality narration first. So that is the things like pacing, tone, voice, things like that. All the things that go into actually a good audiobook that you will not learn in this lesson. Everything we're about to talk about in this lesson is normally the narrator's problem and not necessary for you to know if you're not going to narrate yourself. Here we are. If you're going to narrate yourself. You do need to know everything we're about to talk about. So the four things that you need for a good narration. This is broken down very simply. One is a really good mic, we'll tell you exactly which one. A quiet room, a good voice and voice acting skills. So right off the bat if you're not a professional narrator you're already missing two out of the four. And then also a quiet room. There's nothing we can do for you other than just to let you know and give you a few tips about how to make your room quieter. But Mike we got you covered and then all the nitty gritty about like just the nitty gritty we got you. Now for the microphone you're going to want to purchase a blue Yeti mic for about $150. This microphone is incredible. It's what we're using right now. The microphone, I cannot believe how good the microphone is for such a good price. It's all that you need. It's all that you need. It's like a professional studio level quality microphone. So let's quickly show you just the Amazon page. It's not actually $150, it's actually a bit cheaper than that I've found. So right here just purchase this one. This is what it looks like. This is the exact one you are listening to us speak through right now. This is black. And it just looks awesome. There's a bunch of colors as well. Let me see that. Red looks really cool. Assassin's Creed. Assassin's Creed. That's awesome. I want that. So if I got it again I'd probably get a different color because they're cool. And it's actually only $113 with free shipping on Amazon could not recommend this microphone enough. We'll put a link below this lesson for you to check it out if you want to do this. What a steal. A massive steal. So along with that, narrating in a quiet room is extremely important because your Blue Yeti mic will pick up all of the extraneous noises and ACX will then reject your audio files. Just so you guys know right now, there's a fridge right next to us at an air conditioning. We had to unplug the fridge so you can't hear while recording. Every time we record lessons we have to turn off the AC and unplug the fridge which doesn't even say much. The fridge doesn't say much but it says a lot about the microphone. You also can't narrate in a small room because that creates echo. So along with a quiet room you also need a room that is best fitted for making good narration because small rooms create echo. For example we tried filming these lessons in the guest bedroom. It's like a smaller room like you could not record. It was just massive echo the whole time. So that's another thing that you have to make sure of. But what you can do to reduce the echo is you can lay pillows and blankets around the room which should help with the echo because walls, they don't absorb noise. They reflect the noise but if you draw the curtains, put blankets on the walls, these soft materials will absorb the sounds. So it won't create echo. How about towels on the walls? Towels on the walls works as well. So that's just something to be very conscious of. You can't just sit in your basement, in your small basement. Right now we have the curtains drawn in so that they're covering instead of windows. And this is also why professional narrating studios have this foam on the walls because it absorbs everything. So the important thing is just to do a mic check beforehand which is quite obvious to see how the echo is in your room before you begin even settling down and starting. Getting started with your Blue Yeti mic is not as simple as just plugging it into your computer and clicking record. We used to think this. Remember when we couldn't figure out how to use it? Yeah, we were just stupid. You need to set up a few settings, right? So there are four buttons on a Blue Yeti mic that will tell you exactly what to do with each one. Yes, right now. So put your mic on cardioid mode which you can see right here with the red arrow. It's the setting that looks like an upside down heart. The third option. It is well suited for podcasts, vocal performances and voiceovers. Red mode records sound sources that are directly in front of the microphone delivering rich full body sound. This is directly taken from the Blue Yeti website. So this is definitely the best option for narration. No doubt about it. That just means that when you're using it you have to speak directly into the front. Now Krish and I are next to each other so we don't use this setting. We use the one that activates the mic all the way around because we're speaking from the sides. But that also, the quality suffers a tiny bit as opposed to if you choose this setting and just speak straight to the front. And the next setting to change is the dial above the one we just talked about and that's called the gain setting which determines how much sound and background noise your microphone is going to pick up. You want to turn it all the way down. Unless ours is turned all the way down because when it's up you could hear everything out from the street, motorbikes, dogs. You can almost hear our breaths. You can still hear our breaths. You can hear me like blinking and my eyelashes and my heart beating. Kind of exaggeration but basically. What if we turn it up right now? Should we test it? Or should we not waste our time doing that? Yeah, let's not waste our time on that. Now unless you're in a professional studio then you can have it in the middle. Because it does make it sound more rich but I would just have the gain all the way down. And I think the only time you would ever turn it all the way up is if you were doing like ASMR. Do you guys know what that stuff is? Or if you want to record like nature sounds, you turn it all the way up and it will pick up everything and it will sound like you're there. But it's definitely not for recording an audiobook or anything like that. All the way down for that. Now next when you plug your Blue Yeti mic into your computer of course with the USB cord, then you have to click the mute button so that the red light is on and not blinking. When the red light is blinking that means the mic is muted. We were extremely dumb about this. For some reason I thought when the red light was on it was muted. When it was blinking it wasn't. So when you plug in your Blue Yeti it's automatically set to be muted so you just have to click the button so that the red light is on and then it's not muted and ready to go. The final thing is the volume knob which controls the audio output when your headphones are plugged into the mic that is. It doesn't affect any recording settings at all. Just leave it in the middle. That's just average volume. Ours is on full blast right now. Now it's all the way down. You can tell it doesn't make any difference. So that covers everything you need to know about your Blue Yeti mic. Like your equipment, your narrating equipment is now ready to go. The next thing you need to do is download and install Audacity. Audacity is a free which is incredible. It's free so they take donations but Audacity is a free open source digital audio editor and recording software that is available for both Windows and Mac. Let's quickly go into the link here. This is just the download link. We'll put it in the description below. Audacity free software developed by volunteers so I guess that's why it's free. Yours wants to download it. We already have it downloaded so we're not going to do that. Maybe give them a $5 donation to say thank you. I'll do it one day. Yeah, one day. Back into here. So once you have that done, you will now have Audacity. We'll go into Audacity later and show you a few of the things you need to know about it. But for now, let's talk about ACX's audio submission requirements. Now this is what makes this video so good. It's telling you how to overcome these audio submission requirements. If you just sit down and start narrating, it won't work. ACX will reject everything. So this video is to make sure your audio files actually get approved the first time around. So this right here is pulled straight from ACX's website. Let's just go down to the bullet points below. It says, your submitted audio book must one, be consistent in overall sound and formatting. That's something you can control yourself. Just be consistent throughout the narration and don't touch the formatting that we're going to tell you to use. The next one, be comprised of all mono or all stereo files. Just use mono. The little setting in Audacity, we'll quickly show you, it's just a drop down menu. But yeah, just use mono and then don't touch it. Then next is include opening and closing credits. We've talked about that in another lesson. Include retail audio sample. And then be recorded by a human. It's very interesting that ACX felt the need to put that in there as one of the top five things you need to know. You cannot have your dog is narrated. Your dog cannot narrate, nor can your pet robot. Yeah. No, but they actually put this in because I'm sure some people, oh my God, I can't even imagine how bad that would be. They hired, they got like these computers, these computer robot audio, like text to speech softwares to narrate audio books to just pump out a thousand audio books. Sounds so bad. Yeah. Yeah. People will do that. So don't do that, obviously. Not even allowed to. And then next here are some more specific submission requirements. This is what we need to talk about in depth. So we're going to go through each one. This first one is each audio file must be a 192 kilobytes per second or higher MP3, which is simply just the, how do you explain it? It's the quality. It's the audio file size and the quality of it. That's just something we change when we export, so we'll get into that later. Next is a constant bit rate. We'll change that setting. Don't worry about that. We'll touch it later and then be at 44.1 kilohertz, I believe that stands for. I'll quickly show you that because this one can be intimidating because like what does that even mean? Let me just go into audacity, open audacity here and nice background. Thank you. You're welcome. So audacity and the great thing is when you log in, it's already set to this kilohertz setting, just 44.1 and they just don't touch it. A lot of these things are something you have to set up when you begin and then just don't touch it. Okay? So up here we have the mono or stereo. It doesn't even let us choose mono. So just leave it on mono. Sorry, it doesn't even let us choose stereo. So this is what audacity looks like. We'll get more into it later. Let's go back into here. Now the next thing is each audio file must contain only one chapter and be shorter than 120 minutes. So yeah, that's important. I've heard of people narrating an entire audio book or at least multiple chapters in one audio file and then it gets rejected. Like even if you have a 10 second chapter that just says, hi, then it needs to be one out there. Yeah, this is a chapter. This still needs to be one audio file. Next section header must be read out loud. Section header is simply your chapter title. Next is have room tone at the head and at the tail of your audio file. Let's talk a little bit about that and what it is. So ACX requires a room tone, which is simply just a fancy word for a silent pause at the beginning and end of every audio file. Now just having a one second on each end is perfect. So before you begin talking, simply wait for one second and then at the end of the audio file before you stop the recording, just let it go for one second. So here you could read the specifics down here. Before the beginning, it could actually be between 0.5 and one second and at the end it could be between one and five seconds. Just do one second on each end and everyone's happy. Keep it simple. Well if you do 1.2 seconds, I mean they'll still accept it. I mean technically according to the rule books, it's too long but I've never had an audio book projected for that reason. No. If anything, it's just room tone is too short. So that's what it is. Moving on back to here, the next one is be free of extraneous sounds, which is just the background noises. Like if there's birds chirping or just any sounds that you make with your mouth, ACX does not like. Or before you are about to say something, like don't breathe into the mic so you can hear every breath you make. Or just any sounds like, wow would you ever make that sound? Yeah like motor bikes in the background, anything. This comes back to being in a quiet room. And the next one is your audio must measure between negative 23 decibels and negative 18 decibels RMS. So let's talk about that. That's very intimidating if you don't know what it is. So RMS, which stands for Root to Mean Square, you don't need to know. Just know that it is basically the average sound level of the entire audio file. So the entire audio file is just measuring how loud it is. And the further negative it is, the more quiet it is, and the closer it is to zero, the louder it is. So having your RMS perfect like the first time you record is not necessary because you can change the volume level using the Amplify tool in Audacity. I'll show you how to do that. Maybe I'll show you how to do that right now. So this is not exactly, actually let me just show you instead. So let's go into Audacity and let's record something. Hopefully this works because we're also recording for this lesson video. Let's go. Mic check. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, boom, boom, boom, this is a test. This works. Right there. Okay. So the first, let's just cut this out and cut that out. So RMS measures the average volume of the entire file. So let's just highlight it and then we can analyze, measure RMS. So this is negative 25, which means it would technically be a bit too quiet for ACX. But it's also because there were sections where we didn't talk. If you just highlight here, then analyze, measure RMS. Now it would suddenly be perfectly in the range. So most of the times if you just talk like a normal person, it should fall in the range. Let's say that it's too quiet, like this one is, for example, you could just go into Effect and do Amplify. And we were two decibels off. So you can simply amplify it as let's do three decibels and now it will add negative three. Well, it will, you'll see. Then we go analyze, measure RMS, oops, here analyze. Now it's only three. So it goes at 25, negative 25. Now it's at negative 22. And now it falls in the range. And it's always between 18 and 23. That's good. Yes. So you can literally add the exact number of decibels that you need to to fall into the right RMS range. So it's not like you have to guess how much to enter in the amplify. So that's just how you alter the RMS to make sure it falls where it needs to. Very simple, very easy to do. So now back to the audio submission requirements. So the next one is making sure that you have negative three decibel peak values or less. So negative three is like a loud sound. This scale, I don't know why, but it, the top is zero. And then the rest is in negatives. I feel like it would make more sense the other way around. But yeah, that's how it is. So negative three is loud. All you want to do for that is make sure that for one, it doesn't go above negative three, which it won't if you talk like a normal person. But to make sure it doesn't, we can go into audacity and we can set a limit so that every peak value does not go above negative three. So I'll show you how to do that. You go affect, limiter, negative three decibels. You just set this before you begin recording. So you go affect, whereas limiter, oh it's down here I believe, limiter, oh we need to highlight this effect limiter. So this can be just done afterwards. If this went over, it'll kind of chop off the tops and not make it peak. So we'll just set it to negative three, which is the automatic setting and then click okay. So this one did go down a little bit. So I guess this was technically a peaked audio. So back into here. Onto the next one and final one is you need to make sure you have a maximum noise floor of negative 60 decibels. So noise floor is simply when nothing is going on. When you're not saying anything, the noise floor needs to be negative 60 decibels or quieter. And that just comes back to having a quiet room. There's nothing we could do that for you. And like I said here, it comes down to having a quiet room and having the gain all the way down on your mic will help to lower the noise floor. But what you can do, if something is too loud, you can use the noise reduction effect going here. So let's record something over again. Me? Do I go? No, I'm telling you don't say anything. We're just catching the noise floor and then we can stop it and then you can highlight the whole thing. Effect noise reduction. You could do it by however many decibels you need it to be. We'll do 12 and effect sorry noise reduction and then click OK. And you see it like the noise floor gets minimized. It makes it makes it a lot smaller. Again this is only necessary if it becomes necessary. But our noise floor was definitely acceptable by ACX. Our noise floor is fine. Or see let's quickly measure it to show you. So then we can just highlight this and then check the RMS. And it comes out to negative 61 which is lower than negative 60. So perfect. This would be accepted. Trying going back to see what it was at before. Let's go like that. So this is because the Blue Yeti mic is not the microphone being used. I guess we could change it but it's been using the MacBook Pro microphone. So it's going to be very low quality. So before it was too loud. They would not accept this noise floor but with the Blue Yeti it would not be this high. We are using the Blue Yeti mic right now that's what you're hearing but I guess Audacity wasn't picking that up. No we need to change it but I'm afraid that it's going to mess with the audio recording of this video so I don't want to touch it. Now moving back into the lesson. So that covers the very basics of what you need to do to make sure that your audio files will be accepted by ACX. It really is that simple. There are not many tools you need to use. The amplified tool if you need it. The noise reduction tool if you need it. And things like that. I'll say it's very easy to use when you have this lesson. Before I had no idea what to do right. Now on to narrating. So how to narrate properly. The mic should be at mouth level and about a spread hand away from your mouth about six inches maybe. Six, seven inches. The right volume will obviously depend on your voice so make sure to always do mic checks before you begin. Do a mic check and check the RMS level just to see where you fall and then you can change it afterwards if you need to. Keep the breaths as soft as possible. Avoid any sounds with your mouth like this. Don't do any of that. Avoid touching the mic or table or moving your chair or anything because the blue yeti just might pick it up as it probably did right there. Also sit upright for more breath in your lungs. This is best for projecting your voice. I don't know how good my projection is at the moment but yeah. Because we are by no means professionals at this. Now record your audiobook one chapter at a time then take a rest. Each chapter needs to be a new audio file. If you just record too long at once in one sitting you'll be able to hear it. You will like fatigue will kick in and your production quality will taper off. So you want to be fully rested and keep that consistency. Because if you do get more tired you can hear it and then you're not staying consistent throughout the entire recording which is the last point here. Stay consistent. Now once you have recorded a chapter of your audiobook you obviously need to edit it before you can export it and upload it to ACX. Yes you obviously need to edit it in case there are mistakes which is 99.9% of the time there will be something you need to edit unless you're superman. There's no way you record that whole thing without saying a mistake. Yeah perfectly. No I don't think you did. So you need to edit out any mistakes or retakes that you made while editing and this is very simple. I'll show you how to do that in audacity in a second. But once you have done that your audio file will sound like it was recorded perfectly in one take. Yes. Like these lessons included. They sound like they're one take. Yeah but a lot of them have a lot of cuts in them. Some of them have like dozens and dozens of cuts. Yeah some of them do. Anyway. But in the end it will sound perfect. So before I show you actually how to do it here's just a helpful tip about how to handle your mistakes to make locating and editing out your mistakes easier for you. So after you make a mistake while recording your audio book snap your fingers like that to create a peak in the audio track. So here we have a picture to show you what that looks like. That's just a screenshot I took from my audacity. And then you're just going to want to use the selection tool to highlight and delete the mistake as well as the snap in the audio file. The snap is simply just so that you can locate where your mistakes are. So that you could quickly see where you want to go back to an edit. Otherwise you might have to listen through the entire thing and find the mistakes for yourself. That's you don't need to do that if you do like this. Yeah. Because that would literally take if it's three hours of recording it'll take you like at at the very least three hours just to listen to it back. So once you do make a mistake and take it over you want to take the entire sentence over again and not just the words you messed up at because it could create some incongruency in the audio file like your tone your voice and then you might have to re-record it if it sounds funky just take the entire sentence over again. Yeah that's how you can tell when there is a cut is when you kind of mid sentence do a cut. Yeah. Do it only at the beginning of a sentence. Yeah. So let me show you exactly how to do this and use the selection tool. So let's get rid of this record something quickly. Hello. Welcome to the. Oh. Oh. Oh. I stumbled over a thing. Okay. So the beginning obviously messed up. That was kind of ridiculous. And what I did I clapped instead of snapping just to make sure the peak is very obvious. So simply what you do you can listen back to it. You can see a peak a heavy peak and then you would know everything before that is a mess up or you could just listen from the beginning to see where you messed up. Then you would also get rid of the snap and then here I don't know if you can hear or not but we can't but then here is just the corrected version. It's as simple as that. Editing out your mistakes is just highlight deletes just like that. So let's get back into here. So that honestly covers like everything you really need to know about narrating your audiobook with audacity and then editing the audio files and making sure that your audio files will make ACX happy. But the last thing we need to do is export the audio. So just before you do that make sure to check the audio file for these things before exporting it. That is the 0.5 to 1 second of room tone at the beginning 1 to 5 seconds of room tone at the end. No extraneous sounds RMS between negative 23 and negative 18 peak values of a negative 3 or less and then a Norse floor of negative 60 or less. Now you don't need to listen through your entire recording to make sure it's picture perfect unless you're a perfectionist. Listen to the parts that need your attention and then listen to them over and make sure it sounds fluid and congruent and all sounds like one audio file. So really only check where you did a snap or a clap and where you need to edit and things like that. So you don't need to listen to it back because ACX has a manual review team for that. They will listen to it and make sure it sounds good. And then the final thing to do like I said is export the audio. So we just need to talk about a few export settings. So export the audio file to your laptop or hard drive as an MP3 name the file something like book title chapter one bit rate mode preset. I'll show you this when we export quality you want extreme variable speed fast and then click save and then it exports and then you can upload it to ACX. Let's quickly show you how we do it. So let's just get this back. Save you want export it file export export as MP3. So let's name it AIA 2.0 narration. Sorry to waste your time putting this in. Narration lesson. Okay. Decide where you want to save it MP3 have it on the preset bitrate mode quality. These are the different ones just do extreme because ensures extremely high quality. This is the 92 kilobits per second that ACX was demanding. So if you do in standard sometimes they can fall below. So you want to do extreme variable speed fast channel mode just do joint stereo. And then when everything is set to the right export settings then you just click save and boom it exports and your audio file is now ready to go and can be uploaded to ACX. This was a bit of a lengthy lesson was a lot to talk about. But this should answer and like acknowledge 90% of the questions about how do I narrate so that ACX is happy with my audio files. There you go. This is a lesson that you will probably not see anywhere else on YouTube any other course. But here it is for you guys. You guys deserve the best. You deserve the best from the Megalusense ones. That's what it is. All right. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next lesson. Bye.