If you use Audacity in your home voiceover studio workflow, there are three “hacks” I’d recommend. These settings changes let you visualize Input levels more easily, implement the industry-standard decibel scale for your audio, and assures that your MP3 quality is high.

Why use Audacity in your home voiceover studio?

Over the years, Audacity has remained a popular option as home voiceover recording software. Since it’s a free option, that has meant many new voice actors choose to start with it. When investing in training and equipment, saving money on software may be an enticing choice.

Audacity is often described as “easy to learn,” which I’m not sure I wholly agree with. While arguably simpler than Pro Tools Intro or Studio One Prime (2 other free options), Audacity achieves this at the expense of some desirable functionality (most notably in routing flexibility and the mixer section). It is ultimately geared for music recording projects, defaulting to multiple tracks to separate instruments. As with any multitrack system, we end up simplifying it to serve our needs.

It’s important to mention again that no software records “better” than any other – the quality of what you record is a function of the space itself, your microphone, and interface. Ultimately, the recording software we choose determines the complexity of our workflow. A direct workflow lets us focus on the task of being brilliant behind the microphone. 

Three Steps to a Better Audacity

When working with other voice actors to set up Audacity in their voiceover studio, these are three things I always recommend: 

Step 1 – Float the Meter

The current version of Audacity (version 3.3.2 as of this writing) provides a separate meter for input (recording) and output (playback). Meters give a quick visual reference for the Peaks of your recordings. They live in Audacity’s Toolbar, and in the default layout they are small enough to be entirely unhelpful. One really nice thing about Audacity is that it allows you to rearrange things in the layout. This lets you “float” the Input Meter by grabbing the left edge and dragging it out onto another area of the computer desktop. 

Once you do that, you can adjust both the size and orientation of the meter itself. I like to position it to the right hand side of the recording track and stretch it into a vertical direction by clicking on the edge and resizing it as you would with any onscreen window. That lets me easily see levels onscreen. Moving the Input Meter out of the toolbar then leaves more room for me to stretch the Playback Meter horizontally for more detail. When I’m done, the screen layout appears as below.

Step 2 – Set The Meter and Track Scales to Decibel (dB)

Audacity has historically used a unique “Linear” scale in their default metering. While this may simplify things onscreen, it can be confusing when trying to meet client or ACX delivery specs. Audacity’s “Linear” scale runs from zero to one. Every other recording software uses the decibel (dB) scale. The decibel scale accurately reflects the logarithmic nature of sound as it increases or decreases. While those numbers and the “negative” direction of the dB scale can be a bit confusing at first, they are the common means for describing audio volume. 

There are two main places this shows up – Metering, and the Track itself. I recommend changing both to dB. 

Changing the Scale on Audacity’s Level Meter

On the newly-positioned meter, Right-Click (or Control-Click) on the meter itself. That should bring up a small floating contextual menu where you can select “Options…” Then, in the Options menu under “Meter Type”, you’ll find the ability to select “dB” and can save this moving forward by clicking “OK”.

Changing the Meter Scale for the audio Track

The Tracks are where you see your recorded audio in a horizontal band. Changing the scale here is done through the deeper settings in Audacity. Navigate to “Preferences” under the “Audacity” menu (on Windows, this is called “Settings” and is found under “Edit” menu). This will bring up your Preferences/Settings window where you can select “Tracks” from choices on the left edge. The new version 3.3.2 has fixed one of my biggest gripes with Audacity – the resolution of waveform detail to screen. After selecting “Tracks”, you will see “Default view mode” with a pull-down menu that has new options. Where before you only had “Waveform” or “Waveform (db)”, you now have “Linear (amp)”, “Logarithmic (dB)”, and “Linear (dB)”. Linear (dB) uses the decibel scale and renders the audio waveform to the screen in a manner much more helpful for editing. Click “OK” to save this. 

As with most under-the-hood actions in Audacity, you will likely have to open a new file before you see these changes take place. After that, you will be working with the same measurement scale as your clients and audio engineers. it will make things like “…aim at -12 dB-ish on the Input when recording” that much easier to achieve.

Step 3 – Maximize the MP3 Quality

Audacity saves audio Projects into a proprietary “.aup3” format (or “.aup” if you are using an older version). This is similar to a “Session” or “Song” file in other multitrack environments. The main issue with any of these data formats is that they are unique to the software that created them, so it’s generally not appropriate to send those to a client. We generally deliver WAV audio files as our final format. They can be opened in any other DAW, editing, or playback software. More importantly, they are “lossless” file formats which contain all of the details from the original performance. A WAV file will have all the information captured in the initial recording.

Since those files tend to be large and unwieldy, clients often request the MP3 format for auditions. MP3’s will be about 1/4 the size of a WAV, which make them easy to email and wrangle. That reduction in size can negatively impact audio quality, as it actually discards data from the recording. But audio quality degrades even more if we use “Variable Bit Depth” when exporting as an MP3. That is the default setting in Audacity. 

When you Export as an MP3, check the settings which appear on the dialog box. My recommendation is to use Constant Bit Depth (CBR) and specify 192 kbps. That is the required resolution for audiobook delivery (one of the few clients who will ask for MP3’s as the final delivery format). I find it also provides audibly better results than 128 kbps. This setting should be tenacious in Audacity and should remain there moving forward, though I would check it when you update to newer versions. 

As with any recording application, there will be more details to tune as you develop your workflow for auditions and delivered work in different voiceover genres. But these three steps will serve you well when using Audacity in the home VO studio. 

Does your version of Audacity look different than above?

Ok.. one more… Wondering about the color scheme you see in the images above? There’s one more change you can make. Under Preferences/Settings, you can alter Audacity’s palette into Dark mode – just click on “Interface” and change  “Theme” to “Dark”.

Credit where credit is due – tip o’ the mouse to the Audacity Development Team!

When I shared this post to an Audacity discussion group, Paul Licamelli, one of the AudacityTeam developers shared that the upgrade to the waveform rendering had come from the efforts of Michael Papadopoulus (a college sophomore), as a result of the the Google Summer of Code Project. Paul had supervised the work. Thanks again! This is such a solid improvement.

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