Audacity Tutorial: Punch and Roll for Audiobooks
Here is a quick tutorial for how to set up and do punch and roll, otherwise known as punch and run, recording in Audacity, specifically for recording audiobooks.
The links for Pozotron in this article will give me credit if you decide to use the service. I have vetted this service thoroughly over the last several years and can wholly attest to its effectiveness, which is why I’m comfortable sharing these links. I want to be transparent about the links, however, hence this disclaimer.
Why use punch and roll?
It is a huge time saver. You’ll spend a little more time in the booth recording (not much, but some), but you will spend hours less on editing the bad takes out after the fact.
Did I mention you will save time? This and using Pozotron for QA have cut my production time down by more than half. When I started narrating audiobooks, it was taking me 4-5 hours of production per finished hour of audio. Now, my average is 1.8 hours per finished hour.
No more editing. If you don’t like editing audio, this will virtually eliminate it, or at least dramatically reduce the amount of editing you will need to do.
What you’ll need in your recording space
Monitor
You need to be able to see where you are placing the track marker. If you have to run out of your booth or recording space every time you need to need to make an edit, you might as well stick with dog clicker recording. Check out my tutorial on how that works.
Headphones
You’ll need to be able to hear the track so you know you’re placing the track marker in the correct spot. You’re headphones should also not “bleed” sound into your mic if you record while monitoring…that’s when you can hear your voice in your headphones while you’re recording. If they do bleed sound, it will create a less than desirable quality to your tracks.
Keyboard
You’ll need some way to stop recording, and to tell Audacity to punch and run. I have a wireless 10-key pad in my booth because it’s small and unobtrusive. If you only have a regular keyboard that you can get into your recording space, that’s just fine.
Setting up Audacity for Punch and Roll
Set up punch and roll settings:
Go to the Edit menu, then preferences
Select “Recording” from the preferences on the left hand side of the window
At the bottom, you will see the punch and roll options
Punch and Roll Options Explaination
Pre-roll is how much time you want the recording to go back from where you want your edit. Five seconds is standard, but if you want more or less, you can change that here. Remember to give yourself enough time to prepare yourself to pick up the recording, but not so much that it slows down your production. I would recommend leaving it at five seconds.
Crossfade is the amount of time that Audacity will use to fade down the previous recording and fade up the new one. This helps reduce pops and clicks in the track where the two recordings meet.
Set up keyboard shortcuts in Audacity
Let’s get some keyboard shortcuts set up. I’m going to recommend that for punch and roll that you keep your hotkeys to a single button, as opposed to a combination, like Control G or something like that. The goal here is to work faster, and if every time you need to use this function you have to hit a key combination, it’s going to take more time. It may not seem like much, but with an audiobook, it can add up.
Set up the “Stop” keyboard shortcut
Go to Edit and Preferences again
This time go to the Keyboard option
Search for “Stop”. This is because when you make a mistake, you’ll need to be able to stop recording.
Click on the input field at the bottom of the screen. Whatever key you hit when your cursor is in it will appear here as the hotkey for that command. I’ve chosen the decimal point on the keypad. Choose whatever works for you. If that key is already used by another command, you’ll get a warning, and you should select something else.
Once you have the hotkey you want, click “Set”.
That is now the hotkey for “Stop”.
Set up the Punch and Roll keyboard shortcut
Search for Punch and Roll Record.
Repeat the steps to set a hotkey for this. I’ve chosen the “Enter” key on the keypad. Remember, the “enter” on the keypad is different that the “enter” key that is above the right shift button on your keyboard.
When you’re all done, click on OK.
Set up your monitor for Punch and Roll
Now let’s set up your screen. You should do what works for you…this is just how I do it.
Because my mic is on the right side of my booth, I keep the window with the manuscript I’m narrating on the left. This way I can keep a good distance from the mic, see the manuscript clearly, and have my head angled to reduce mic pops without sacrificing on sound quality.
I use the automatic window docking that Windows 10 has by “pushing” the manuscript to dock it to the left-hand side of the screen, and then select my Audacity project to automatically dock to the right.
How to Punch and Roll record for audiobooks
Begin narrating.
When you make a mistake, or need to stop for any reason, hit your hotkey to stop recording.
Place the track marker where you want to pick up recording.
Hit your hotkey for punch and roll.
The track will be split where you placed the marker, and everything to the right of it (the stuff you want to re-record) will be deleted.
The track will back up the amount of time that you set in the Punch and Roll preferences. In this case, 5 seconds.
When the track reaches your marker, playback will stop and recording will automatically begin at that point.
Continue narrating
And that’s it. It takes a little practice to get used to the work flow, but eventually you’ll build up some muscle memory and be able to do this very efficiently. The big upside: no more editing. You won’t need to go back and take out all of the bad takes. If you combine this will good hydration and mic technique to reduce mouth clicks and mouth noise, and Pozotron for QA, you’ll find that your audiobook production time will go waaay down.