ACX Check in 2021?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
September 10, 2021
2 replies
3123 views

Has AA done anything about (or even hinted at) adding an "ACX Check" tool? Right now (still, and for the past several years!) the only quick way to find out if your audio meets all the ACX requirements is to open the file in Audacity and use the free plugin that only works in that program. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard.

I just downloaded and tested the new Sound Forge Pro 15, and THAT has two new ACX tools built right in - and ACX check, which tests for 5 requirements set by Audible. If you are working in SF, you can now stay in the program and not have to open your audio in Audacity just to do an ACX check. I could easily see situations where audiobook editors would choose SF over AA due ONLY to this feature.

SFP 15 has also added a new tool called ACX Export. The idea here, I believe, is to automatically apply multiple processes to hit the ACX targets -- max peak, max noise floor, target avg RMS range, duration, etc. My initial test with that last tool was not good. It made the audio sound worse - probably because it did multiple push/pulls to meet the max peak while also getting the loudness in the target range, combined with trying to apply NR for a max noise floor. And this was after I'd already run the check and passed everything but the peak and average loudness scores. So THAT tool in SF15 has a way to go before it is very useful.

I just found a thread about all this in this forum from 2018 and thought I'd check back to see if there had been any progress on at least doing ACX checks.

This topic has been closed for replies.

JPHiggs

Known Participant

For anyone else looking for the same capability, go here https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911314-audition/suggestions/44129463-please-add-an-acx-check-tool and vote for them to do so.

SteveG_AudioMasters_

Community Expert

No point in posting this here, I'm afraid. We can only really deal with the here and now, not the wishlist. If you want something like that added, then there are two routes available. The first is to post it on the Audition User Voice page which is here and the second is to persuade somebody to write an Audition Extension to do this. Quite frankly I think you stand a better chance with the latter, as there's no restriction on anybody creating one. Actual additions to Audition itself tend to be driven by the major players (hundreds of thousands of seats), as they are the ones putting most of the finance into it - not a few individual editors doing audio books.

Being realistic, the best you could hope for with Audition is something that does a check for you, not any sort of automated correction system. Apart from any other considerations, automated correction would mean that you learned nothing - and the best way to make material ACX-compatible is to learn what you needed to do at the recording stage so that you don't need to tweak things anything like as much; everything is improved that way. I'm not in the slightest surprised that Sound Forgery fails to make any sort of decent job of automated correction. Apart from anything else, it has no ears...

K

KenTheriotAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks Steve. Mostly I was just checking to see if I'd missed something in the past few years about updates. I have CC so it updates automaticallyh and I don't always pay attention to what's in each new edition. then I sort of went on a bit of a rant :-P.

And as you say, the check is really all I'd like to have. While it would be cool to have the ability to automate all the things needed to make the audio compliant, I really don't trust things like that much, since I don't know what they are doing under the hood to my audio.

Yes, I can do each check individually. And for 1 file, that's not that hard. But I've got a job right now with 25 chapters, each of which has to individually be checked on all these elements. That really adds time to my job.

Anyway, I just added the request in the User Voice area. thanks again for your insight!

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