Record an Audiobook with Hindenburg – Part II: Recording

My new audiobook for Agile Discovery & Delivery just became available! I used a program called Hindenburg Narrator to record it myself. This is Part II in a multi-part series about how I created my own audiobook. There is very little out there about Hindenburg, so I thought I’d share my journey for any author who is thinking about recording their own audiobook right now. In Part I: Setting Up Your Studio, I discuss how I built my own studio at home, why I chose Hindenburg Narrator, and how I modified my book’s text to get it ready for recording. In this post, I’ll go over the recording process.

Recording My Own Audiobook

Assuming you’ve done all of the set-up work from my last post, here are the steps to begin recording your audiobook with Hindenburg. Hindenburg has a fairly good set of getting started videos that you can watch and follow along with too.

• Open Hindenburg Narrator & ensure your recording equipment is set-up and hooked up to your computer.
• Open your audiobook script by using the Open icon at the top.
• Change your settings by selecting Narrator->Settings and choose the microphone you’d like to use (typically, Hindenburg would show me a pop-up asking me if I wanted to use the microphone I had plugged in, which is helpful).
• Also under settings, make sure sample rate is 44100 Hz, which is a requirement for ACX.
• Before you can record, you must arm the track by pressing the red record button in the bottom left of the Narration box (see the first screenshot below).
• Check that the levels are correct by speaking into your microphone and noticing whether the meter at the bottom is bouncing between -12 and -9 to avoid clipping or distorting (see the second screen shot below). If not, use the slider under “Narration” (first screen shot below) to adjust the levels. If your screen doesn’t quite look like mine, right-click on the leveling area and make sure you have “Digital QPPM” selected. Once you’ve changed these settings, try not to change them for the duration of your audiobook.
• To start recording, you can either press the right arrow key or hit record (the circle icon at the bottom of the screen — see the second screenshot below).
• To stop recording, press the space bar or the square icon near record.

Managing Your Script

Note that as you record your book, Hindenburg will highlight the text you are currently reading. However, it doesn’t move that highlighted region automatically. You’ll need to click the right arrow key each time you move to another paragraph.

When you advance the script, Hindenburg adds a little yellow tab above the audio track that tells the program to advance your script when you play it back. Keeping those tabs in sync with your audio requires some careful editing skills, which I’ll discuss in my next post.

Re-recording vs Editing

You can re-record as you go by stopping, resetting the white line (set point) to the place you’d like to start, then hitting the record button again.

Instead of doing that each time I messed up (which, was a LOT), I chose to pause when I made a mistake, say the words “starting over” and continue after another pause. I felt that continuing while I was on a roll was easier than stopping to edit as I went.

After about an hour of reading, my voice got tired, so stopping each day and giving it a rest felt like the right thing to do. I ended up trying to read one chapter a day. I’d heard from many other authors that they would read their entire book over the course of two days and then proceed to completely lose their voices. I wanted to avoid that.

Each day, I would back-up my Hindenburg file along with the WAV files I produced using Google Drive. I then left some time to do some rudimentary editing, getting rid of those places where I messed up. I’ll talk about that more in the next post.

Start By Recording A Little Bit

As I mentioned in last week’s article, I made one major mistake right out of the gate. I tried to use a “recording studio” we had on UW-Madison’s campus, but it ended up being way too noisy. You could hear the noise from the library outside the door. I ended up recording three chapters of my book before contacting Hindenburg support to ask a few questions. At that point, Nick, one of their support contractors pointed out that I had a lot of noise in the tracks and that it probably wouldn’t be suitable to use for the book. Please take a look at last week’s article to save yourself a lot of time by setting your space up correctly from the start.

Even if you have a fantastic space, it’s still a good idea to record a little bit and then run an export test to see if you have any major problems.

Test Your Recording

One of the things I really appreciated about Hindenburg is that it allows you to export specifically for ACX and separately for Findaway Voices. To ensure you don’t have any major issues with your recording, I recommend you do the following:

1. Start by recording a couple of sections.
2. Save a second copy of your book off in Hindenburg Narrator so that you still have a clean version to work with. This is really important. Hindenburg adds some noise to the beginning of each track after you run an export that I didn’t like, so avoid that by saving a clean copy. I’ll talk about this more in the editing or uploading article.
3. Do the Export->Export to ACX… action.
4. Hindenburg will automatically run a check on your book at this point. It will make sure the levels are normalized across the whole thing, check for gaps in your recording that Amazon won’t like, and fix pauses. If there are any issues, an error message will pop up before your book exports.

Note that Hindenburg automatically creates one mp3 file per section that you’ve started with H1 Heading text in your audiobook script. This means that you can record the whole book in one file so that all of the audio matches and gets auto-corrected together. Then Hindenburg will automatically make mp3 files for each of your chapters, the introduction, and so on. This is quite a nice feature.

Common Export Error Messages & Issues

If you do receive an error message, Hindenburg does not make it easy for you to figure out what to do about it. I can’t find a list of common error messages anywhere online and Hindenburg’s support site doesn’t go into what to do about the errors. I ended up sending multiple messages to support. The support team seems to be fairly quick. Most of my messages were answered by the next day, but sometimes it took a few days for them to get back to me, usually when I had asked a particularly tough question.

Above, you’ll see a few of the common error messages I received.

• “No Narration” simply means you haven’t recorded that section of your book yet. Those you can ignore.
• “Pauses corrected” can also be ignored. Hindenburg seems to take care of those for you.
• “Levels” may not be OK, which means you should go back to the set-up section above or Hindenburg’s Academy Videos and try to get your levels in the right place.
• “Missing Room Tone” means that you have space between your sections where you haven’t recorded anything. Typically this would be caused by me editing something out and not moving the rest of the sections forward correctly. Sometimes those gaps are so small you can’t see them, so you’ll need to go to the time listed and pull your sections closer together.

How Long Did It Take to Record my Audiobook?

My book is fairly short. It’s less than 200 pages and eight chapters (if you include the introduction). My original plan was to have the recording done in less than two weeks, with me recording one chapter at a time. I thought that I could then go through and edit the book in less than two weeks also, so I would be able to upload it in a month.

That did not work out as expected. While my recordings stayed pretty much on schedule, editing took way longer than I expected. It took me from mid-March to early June to get my book ready to upload. Initial recordings were done by end of March and the rest of the time I spent editing.

The entire next blog post will be dedicated to the editing process.