Creating an Audio Guide is a great way to establish your virtual tour as more accessible and immersive. In this post, we'll be sharing how to record and edit audio clips, and configure audio in your tours in Circuit.
To break down the work, we recommend recording audio one tour at a time. For medium sized tours with 20-30 scenes, you can expect recording time to be around 30 minutes, and editing will require about the same length of time.
Accessibility note:
Keep in mind that audio clips are designed to follow the text in the guide card. Put another way, the guide card provides the text captions for each audio clip. To ensure accessibility standards are met, avoid recording audio that doesn't match with the guide card text.
You can review a visual gallery of this tutorial, or detailed written instructions below.
Production
What you Need to Get Started
Recording software - in this guide we will be using Audacity on Windows 10 as it's free and easily accessible. Any recording tools will work however, as long as they can export an MP3 file.
USB Mic - we are using a Blue Yeti Nano USB Microphone, but any microphone that can capture crisp sound will work.
A quiet space to record - most mics will pick up background noise, so finding a nice quiet place to record your clips is a must.
Time - in our experience, a tour containing 20 scenes will take around 20-30 minutes to record, and the same amount of time to edit. Extensive retakes may push the recording time a little longer.
Recording Set Up
Here are a few tips before you start recording.
Some microphones have different recording modes. We want cardioid mode, which records sounds that are directly in front of the microphone.
Make sure that the microphone is a reasonably short distance from your mouth, this will make it easier to edit out any background noise later.
Have your virtual tour ready on a screen in front of you, with the tour splash screen open (cover page of the tour), and your mouse within reach.
Before you start recording, you can check your mic levels with the recording meter toolbar. -6dB is a good maximum signal level to aim for.
Have a glass of water handy, and a chair that helps you sit up straight.
Recording Audio
Now it's time to launch Audacity and start recording. A few things to keep in mind:
Warm up your voice by reading through all the descriptions in your tour once before you start. This will also help you plan for longer paragraphs that require pauses.
Read each text description within the guide card at a steady pace, not too quick or too slow. See the "How to record a voice over" video below for help with pace and tone.
If the text description adequately describes the space, you may choose to skip reading the title of the guide card.
As an example, see the video below where the narrator has chosen to skip over titles as they are included in the paragraph text. This results in a less fragmented and more natural sounding read audio clip.
After clicking the NEXT button, allow a one or two second pause between the click and when you start reading. The clips will be trimmed later in editing to remove the click sounds.
If there is a call to action button or a link contained in the guide card, consider stating a phrase like "Learn more about this through the link in the guide card" or simply adding "hyperlinked here" after hyperlinks that are contained in the text.
⚠ Important: record audio on a single file if possible. This will make it easier to make global adjustments to the entire file before trimming and exporting it into multiple clips.
Post-Production
With your audio recorded, you'll now trim the file into separate clips that will be uploaded into Circuit and added into each scene within your tour.
Creating Sound Clips
If you recorded a single sound file, you'll want to break up the recording into clips. For each clip, trim it in such a way that eliminates pauses at the start and end. This ensures that your audio plays right away when the scene loads without any delay. If you're using Audacity, follow the steps below to edit the full recording before breaking it down into separate clips.
Removing Background Noise
If there is constant static or background noise like the hum of a computer fan, you can remove it with the Noise Reduction effect in Audacity.
Highlight a small section of your audio with the background noise
Go to Effects > Noise Reduction, and click "Get Noise Profile" so that Audacity knows what to filter out
Then go back and select the entire audio track (or click it's box on the left), go to Effects > Noise Reduction (try 12db first) and press OK
Listen to your audio, and if there is still some background noise, repeat the steps above. This should have very little effect on the important parts of the audio - your voice
If isolated sounds are being picked up, such as mouse clicks, you can remove them by pressing CTRL+X.
Changing the Tone
If you would like a richer tone in your audio files, you can also add Bass and Treble effects.
Go to Effects > Bass and Treble (start with 6db in bass or treble) and click Apply
Exporting Audio
Once you are happy with the sound of your files, export them by going to File > Export > Export as MP3.
Naming your File
To make the subsequent matching process easier in the CMS, name audio files to follow the naming convention used within the CMS.
For scenes, this would follow a
[Group folder] - [Scene name]naming formula.For hotspots, this would follow a
[Group folder] - [Scene name] - [Hotspot title]naming formula.
This makes it easier for editors to work with them later on.
Recorded Audio
If you would like, you can revisit our overview on the differences between recorded and generated audio. You can also learn how to upload recorded audio files to the Circuit CMS and add them to your scenes. Click the links below to get started! 🖱️
💡 Need more help?
Send us a message and we will be happy to assist you.