Recording and processing spoken word

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2024/recording_and_processing_spoken_word.html

Larry Tratt's advice on how to get decent quality out of your office's sound.

• Use a USB mic
• dampen the sound in the room
• record without clipping
• compress the dynamic range with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i in.flac \  
  -af "acompressor=threshold=-24dB:attack=2.5:release=15:ratio=3" \
  out.flac

• normalize with ffmpeg-normalize:

ffmpeg-normalize <input file> -o normalised.mp3 \
  -c:a mp3 -b:a 96 -pr -t -16 -tp -1