Making Audiobooks 2 (Share your experience)

Question

Audio

Hello habrolud!

I had a hypothetical need to create an audiobook. At first, of course, I searched and found this question on Habré: Creating audiobooks , but I'm interested in the more technical side of the problem.

Does anyone in the community have experience making audiobooks that they would like to share? For example, what is the best bitrate to use? And in general, the sound settings for the output? There will be only a voice, without music and special effects. I would like the files to be fun in the end smaller, because audiobooks are listened to mainly from mobile devices, and free space in them is worth its weight in gold!
I will do it, most likely in Adobe Audition, if no one advises the best option for a particular task. As I understand it, from the processing there will be just removing unnecessary noise and cutting into chapters, right?

Answer 1

Not for the sake of advertising, but on the abook-club.ru forum they will help you, there are special sections for beginners and seasoned readers.

Answer 2

I worked at a speech studio, the process was like this.
1. Recording a bunch of takes in a multitrack, in your case, Audition will do. In the process of recording from 2 to 3 participants. The sound engineer with the script follows the text that everything is read correctly, says stop and motor, keeps order on the tracks. The artist reads and rereads. An optional director/producer oversees the artistic side of the reading and steers the takes.
2. The best doubles are selected and glued together. Everything is dumped into one file.
3. The result is manually processed in Sound Forge. Numerous clicks and spitting, which are present in large numbers, are removed. Silences are inserted between words and phrases.
4. Normalization, approximation to the correct RMS.
Bitrates don't really matter. MP3 in 128 bits - normal listening quality. For a good source, you need a good device, in the minimum ideal - an average mic and a normal tube preamplifier. The latter does 90% of the work in creating a good tone. It is possible without it.