Audio book editing and mastering

[lclyman]

Anybody here doing audio book editing and mastering..?

I've been doing that for a few years, working on projects for Random House and Time Warner/Hachette Audio...

I'm looking to network with other editors and mastering folks to compare notes and maybe expand work possibilities..

Thanks,
Larry

[NorthEnlight]

Originally Posted by lclyman

Anybody here doing audio book editing and mastering..?

I've been doing that for a few years, working on projects for Random House and Time Warner/Hachette Audio...

I'm looking to network with other editors and mastering folks to compare notes and maybe expand work possibilities..

Thanks,
Larry

Hi Larry,

I've been producing audio books for the education industry for about 3 years now. I too would be interested in knowing how other do this kind of work. Feel free to post away or PM me.

[lclyman]

I notice your from "Chi-City"..

Do you mean Chicago...?

Larry

[NorthEnlight]

Originally Posted by lclyman

I notice your from "Chi-City"..

Do you mean Chicago...?

Larry

Indeed!

[smsjr]

Completed a huge audio book project a couple of months back. 104 books in just over a month. It was a bit insane. Fortunately, they were children's books, with the longest being about 95 pages. A lot of work though, requires a lot of attention to detail.

Would love to hear how you guys are doing them. We recorded them in a whisper room, using a TLM 103 going through a Focusrite Green mic pre. Recorded into Pro Tools at 24Bit 44.1. I am not a big fan of Whisper Rooms. They would have come out much better in a real vocal room, but we worked with what we had. A small team of editors worked on getting through all of the material, and then they were processed and mastered.

Steve

[Audion]

I am the executive producer for one of the largest AudioBook production facilities in the US. We Produce nearly a 1000 Longform AudioBooks a year. We have 9 Studios and 45 post stations. We use Neumann u87, John Hardy, Apogee, Pro Tools, Iac Vocal Booth and Tuned Control Rooms. We Master mostly ITB using Waves and Other Plugs.

[Riccardo]

Interesting thread!

We (my business partner mostly) also have been doing some for a very small market.
Vocal booth, usually a Brauner, sometimes a Neumann SDC depending on the voice, Pro Tools, mastered mostly OTB.

I'd like to hear other experiences as well, also on how widespread or "popular" the format is in different territories.

[Geert van den Berg]

The company I work for also records audio books sometimes. It is gaining in popularity here also.

One of the problems we encounter is that in Holland some companies are satisfied with mediocre quality, like recordings made in hollow sounding rooms (living rooms/kitchens???) and also other noises and then are editted by (audio)students, who might do a book for 100 euro's or something like that.

So that's quite hard to compete with that. On the recording quality side we can easily do better than they do, but editting + mastering and cd burning is about twice the reading time. We are very carefull, removing faulty takes, noises and making sure the rhythm stays good (when someone takes larger breaks between sentences in certain chapters). So it's not very profitable.

I wonder how this is done in other countries. Any recording methods. Here we just make notes at where the faulty parts are and edit them out later, offcourse sometimes we punch over faulty parts as well.

[smsjr]

I have found that careful script notes and punching in whenever I can are essential to making the edit go as smooth and quickly as possible. And the best friend an editor has is a voice talent that knows what the heck they are doing. If you have to remove a lot of lip smacks, adjust pacing, remove breaths every 2 seconds, etc. the process becomes quite frustrating. When you have a real pro doing the readings, it's like a breath of fresh air.

Steve

[iamstudios]

@ Geert: we are experiencing exactly the same. It's almost impossible to compete with that.

Also, the few audiobook publishers that do exist in the Netherlands seem to build recording facilities themself. Those are usually bad sounding (hollow rooms, crappy hardware) indeed. Another thing I'm noticing is that here the original writer is used to read the book, not a professional voice talent. So the editing takes a lot longer too, resulting in even higher cost. I can't see a way to make audio book recording and editing profitable without safing on quality...

cheers

Barnier

[Riccardo]

Originally Posted by Geert van den Berg

The company I work for also records audio books sometimes. It is gaining in popularity here also.

One of the problems we encounter is that in Holland some companies are satisfied with mediocre quality, like recordings made in hollow sounding rooms (living rooms/kitchens???) and also other noises and then are editted by (audio)students, who might do a book for 100 euro's or something like that.

So that's quite hard to compete with that. On the recording quality side we can easily do better than they do, but editting + mastering and cd burning is about twice the reading time. We are very carefull, removing faulty takes, noises and making sure the rhythm stays good (when someone takes larger breaks between sentences in certain chapters). So it's not very profitable.

I wonder how this is done in other countries. Any recording methods. Here we just make notes at where the faulty parts are and edit them out later, offcourse sometimes we punch over faulty parts as well.

Yes it seems to be common in Europe with the exception of the U.K. where the marked is developed and healthy.

In most European countries publishers are still well behind their anglophone colleagues and relying on cheap and low quality audio services.

Hopefully this will change.

[Geert van den Berg]

Originally Posted by smsjr

And the best friend an editor has is a voice talent that knows what the heck they are doing.

Absolutely! Our policy is that if we cannot choose the voice talent (we usually send the client a couple of suggestions) we charge an hourly price.

Originally Posted by iamstudios

Another thing I'm noticing is that here the original writer is used to read the book,

Yes that happens sometimes. While the writer usually isn't a routined voice talent, I do think this can add something to the listening experience knowing the writer is reading (offcourse it's merely done to sell more audiobooks), luckily sometimes they're good readers.

[kailpot]

Great thread!

As an enginner for radio we often do this type of work. Use usually an U87 into SADiE 5. Also use Neve comp. Work with one producer, and hopefully talented reader(s). The producer is the person taking charge of the pace, intonations, stress etc. Engineer is more responsible for the tech/editing side of things, although our opinions are often sought. Recently started doing drop-ins rather than editing false takes and this seems to speed up the workflow for sure! (We do another pass over the dropins later) IMHO SADiE is much quicker and nicer for this work than PTools (which I also love for other stuff!)

[Chris G]

how does one get into the audiobook biz???? It seems like such a niche market. Advertising works for Post and Music, but how do you even advertise for audiobooks or get clients?

My dad is a very successful VO talent for the last 28 years, he was going to try to get into doing audiobooks as the talent and do the post work (fx and such) on his PT rig, but for lack of time and incoming biz, he just moved on.

are you guys marketing the book publishers?

this thread is like a lighbulb coming on.

[Patch Morrison]

just had to drag this thread out of the depths.

im just about to complete my MA in Audio Technology and my final major project is an Audio book of short stories with additional music and SFX layers.

have any of you any experience in scoring or designing sfx for audio books?

would be interesting to get some opinions on it...

[mikevarela]

Like the thread. I'm also interested in handling some of this work too and wondering what agency I should talk to about freelancing.

Also, when you guys say false takes, what do you mean? Extra non scripted dialog?

[Patch Morrison]

doesn't it mean fluffed lines?

or lines that you had to glue (comp) together from different versions?

[jahtao]

Yo Patch, check out these radio shows for GREAT music and sfx integration with a story. Its not a book, more of a radio play, but quality is high.

BBC Cult presents: 2000AD and British comics - listen to Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog on audio

[Patch Morrison]

cheers for that, will be good stuff for my research portfolio.

o yeah this is me at the voice recording stage. if anyone cared..









Used an 87 going into a Focusrite Voice Master Pro then directly into Reaper (first time i used it, pretty straight forward. The edit was done in Logic though)
recorded at Talking Issues in Bath (my hometown wooohooo)

[Patch Morrison]

just thought i would resurrect this thread coz i have now finished my MA and you can hear an example of one of the stories here.

[jahtao]

[danijel]

Sounds great!

I like the music very much, and the fine level it was layed at. And the reading performance is superb - non-artificial, yet diverse. I'm occasionally listening to audio books with my kids (as they learn English), so I guess I have the idea of what they generally sound like, and this one rules!

[Patch Morrison]

ah wicked. glad you liked it mate.. cheers for the feedback.

[rhumphries]

Originally Posted by Geert van den Berg

Absolutely! Our policy is that if we cannot choose the voice talent (we usually send the client a couple of suggestions) we charge an hourly price.



Yes that happens sometimes. While the writer usually isn't a routined voice talent, I do think this can add something to the listening experience knowing the writer is reading (offcourse it's merely done to sell more audiobooks), luckily sometimes they're good readers.

About 15 years ago I recorded a book on tape read by the author, except that the book had been ghost written, so the "author" couldn't pronounce some of the words in his own book!

-Richard

[DSD_Mastering]

Here's one for you... Just had a childrens book go to print. The book is about a goldfish and a 9yo girl did the dialog. Thing is... she had braces/expander on and I spent 2 days de-essing!!!


Regards,

[Thomas W. Bethe]

We have done a couple of audio books and it is fun. I got my start in radio so I know how to get the best out of the talent and know what a good voice is suppose to sound like. We use a RODE NT2A with a BLUE Robbie preamp into Wavelab. You have to be very detail oriented and have your wits about you as the project progresses. It is hard or sometimes impossible to bring back voice talent for a one word or one sentence reading especially if they are from out of town so you better make sure you have everything captured the first time.

The last audio book I did featured a lot of different readers and none of them were professionals. It was great to work with so many different people but a pain to edit. The biggest problem for me is getting the same voice sound if the project goes on for weeks or months with the same actor/reader. Things change from one day to the next because we do so many voice overs and even things like microphone to speaker's lips distance changes and you can really hear that on playback especially if you have to cut in a sentence or word that was recorded at a different time.

I would like to do more of this and I too wonder how others advertise their services and to whom do they advertise.

Great topic!

[loujudson]

I'm joining this thread and wishing i were doing more audiobooks! I produced and engineered several hundred in the 80sand 90s, until the ocal company ran out of money and the majoes took the bulk of their work in-house. I'm a freelancer in the Bay Area and would love to be doing more audiobooks!

I did a lot of them in the analog days, and editing mouthnoises and breaths on 7.5 IPS analog is a refined skill; it is so much easier on a DAW.

Lou Judson

[voiceactor]

Cool thread. I do voice acting for a living. I can tell you it's the same all over the industry as far as people out there doing it cheaper. (I think this is true in a lot of industrys where being able to put a home studo in makes one an instant business)
Being a voice talent right now is really a popular thing to do. There are a lot of people spending a lot of money trying to get rich and famous. Kind of like the early days in Hollywood and everyone wanted to be a star. Not many will make it. Some will try to cut prices to get business but when the client finds out the product doesn't sale and the reason the product doesn't sale is the quality, they look at things differently..we hope. So down the road here...we'll lose a lot of these folks who found it wasn't as easy as just picking up a book and reading it...

[Thomas W. Bethe]

Originally Posted by voiceactor

Cool thread. I do voice acting for a living. I can tell you it's the same all over the industry as far as people out there doing it cheaper. (I think this is true in a lot of industrys where being able to put a home studo in makes one an instant business)
Being a voice talent right now is really a popular thing to do. There are a lot of people spending a lot of money trying to get rich and famous. Kind of like the early days in Hollywood and everyone wanted to be a star. Not many will make it. Some will try to cut prices to get business but when the client finds out the product doesn't sale and the reason the product doesn't sale is the quality, they look at things differently..we hope. So down the road here...we'll lose a lot of these folks who found it wasn't as easy as just picking up a book and reading it...

I've had students from a correspondence school that charges them about $3,500.00 to teach them how to become voice talents do their final exam here. Two of the people that attended this school have "graduated" and are finding that there is not quite the need for them that the school seemed to indicate. The school says that there are plenty of jobs out there (the trick is finding them. )

I have also helped a couple of people I know and have used for VO work set up voice studios in their homes so they can do voice over work easily without leaving their house and so far they seem to be happy with the quality of what they can produce at home. They still come here for the session that I need them for but their home studios are used for everything else. It seems like with most things finding the work is harder than actually doing it. It also seems like a lot more people have the idea that by becoming a voice talent they can make some real money but are finding that simply having a good voice is not a guarantee of a steady source of income.

Only time and talent will eventually decide who will make it and who will not.

Good topic!

[Hauista]

Just wanted to add another audiobook editor to this thread..

Work mainly on Law based books which is interesting. I'm essentially going to law school, but getting paid to do it.