Audiobook Narrator Resource: Is ACX “AudioLab” actually helping you? – Tuesday Tech Tip

ACX “AudioLab” – Useful or not?

ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) recently announced their “AudioLab” service. They promote it as a tool to check audio quality against ACX delivery spec. I played with AudioLab over last weekend. The result: I’m unsure of what they are trying to do. 

It’s not clear that AudioLab does anything you aren’t already doing with your audiobook workflow. 

In some cases, it seemed to provide a misleading response about the quality of submitted audio.

AudioLab is a page on the ACX site where you can upload an MP3 of your recording. Once you do that, it provides an automated report which you can then download and view. The report can be compared against ACX submission standards for RMS, Peak, Output Bitrate, Constant Bitrate Encoding and Sample Rate. You can check the specs for your audio before final upload on a project page. 

I also encountered a FB group post in which someone stated that AudioLab had given them specific EQ corrections on their audio. (EQ – or Equalization – would be frequency filtering to correct and balance how the audio sounds). However, this did not seem to be the case. I uploaded several samples with purposely bad sound and received no feedback to that effect.

(Quick question to those of you who have produced multiple books through ACX – have you ever received feedback or suggestions from ACX regarding the quality of your sound – specifically EQ settings? – and if you have, would you please let me know?)

While uploading poorer and poorer samples through the page, I noticed the automated response continued to give positive confirmations – even when my Peaks were in the -1 dB range and the RMS sat at -16 dB (too high and too loud), it kept stating “No issues found”…The only error message it provided occurred when I uploaded a WAV file by mistake. 

If I had not downloaded the spreadsheet and read the numbers (which did match my Twisted Wave “Analyze” values), I might have wrongly assumed everything was OK. You must download the generated Excel spreadsheet to read the actual results.

Unless I’m missing something, AudioLab does nothing you can’t already check with a decent analysis tool (in Twisted Wave or RX, for example), or confirm even more comprehensively using 2nd Opinion by Steven Jay Cohen. 2nd Opinion also gives more information, allowing you to confirm the noise floor, as well as header/tail length. Additionally, you can have it check the complete “batch” of your audio files – all the chapters at once rather than uploading the audio one file at a time. All which makes 2nd Opinion a much better tool for efficient workflow. 

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