Producing an audiobook in AudLit

Details is title, author, narrator and description. Settings is where two choices actually matter:

• Output specification. ACX Audiobook is the default and is what you want for Audible. The others exist for broadcast, corporate and phone work, and each one changes the sample rate, the loudness target and the compliance thresholds AudLit will hold you to at the very end. Pick it now — it is the standard your finished files get measured against.
• Your audio folder. The folder on your own machine where every take will be written. Choose somewhere backed up: this is where your recordings live.

An empty project opens on Import Your Manuscript, with two ways in:

• Browse Files, or drag and drop — .docx, .epub, .fb2, .pdf, .rtf, .txt, .htm/.html.
• Paste Text — for a script you are copying out of an email or a web page.

DOCX and EPUB import most cleanly, because they carry real heading information — the file itself knows which lines are chapter titles. PDF is the hardest case: a PDF has no idea what a chapter is, only what a line of type looks like. For PDFs there is a Use AI to find chapters option that reads the text and works the boundaries out. Turn it on for a PDF; you rarely need it for DOCX.

Read the import preview — the five minutes that save you hours

AudLit shows you what it found as an Import Preview before anything is saved. You are checking three things:

1. Did it find the right number of chapters? One enormous section means chapter detection failed. Go back and try the AI option, or a different file format — do not carry on.
2. Are the section types right? Every section is Front Matter, Part, Chapter or Back Matter. Marking the title page, copyright page and dedication as front matter now keeps your chapter numbering honest for the rest of the book.
3. Did paragraphs survive? Open a chapter and scan it. If sentences are broken mid-line, or several paragraphs have fused into a wall of text, fix it now with the tools below.

Press Save Structure when it looks right. You can re-import later if you need to — chapters you have already recorded keep their takes.

Imports are never perfect. The Tools menu holds fixes for the common damage — every one is deterministic and shows you what it will change before it changes it:

• Fix hyphens — rejoins words a line break split (pro-cess → process) while leaving real compounds like well-known alone. It checks a dictionary rather than guessing.
• Fix stranded quotes — repairs punctuation a PDF detached from its word (Don’ t → Don’t).
• Rejoin split sentences… — merges a fragment stranded as its own paragraph back onto the sentence it belongs to. It refuses when the next paragraph opens a quotation, because that is dialogue rather than damage.
• Footnotes… — finds footnote markers so you can decide what to do with them before you are reading aloud.
• Add chapter headings, Compare with original, Generate credits… — for numbering, for checking AudLit’s text against your source file, and for the ACX credits script.

Proofread in Document View

The structure editor has two modes. Row View is one row per paragraph — good for surgery. Document View renders the chapter as flowing text the way you will actually read it, which is far better for spotting a paragraph break in the wrong place. In either view you can merge paragraphs, split a section, change a section’s type, and edit text directly.

Alongside is View Original, which opens your source file next to the parsed structure and scrolls in sync, so you can check AudLit’s version against the real manuscript.

Before you record a chapter, AudLit can scan it for words the transcriber is likely to get wrong — proper names, foreign words, invented words — and offer them for review. Approving one tells the transcriber to expect it, which means fewer false flags at the Analyze step and a cleaner cleanup.

Do not add ordinary English words, and do not add bare numbers. Numbers are handled separately, and boosting a common word makes the transcriber hear it everywhere.

Open a chapter and press Record in the project tabs. The page has three parts: your script in the middle, a sidebar on the right, and a waveform dock across the bottom that appears once a take is loaded.

At the top of the sidebar is a stepper naming the five steps for the chapter you are on — Record → Analyze → Clean up → Master → Approve. The gold button under it always names your next action. If you are ever lost, press that button.

Below the stepper the sidebar is six collapsible groups: Setup, Record, Review, Fix & Edit, Master & Deliver and Takes. Only one is open at a time, and it opens the right one for you as you move through the chapter. Worth knowing early: the Analyze button lives in the Review group.

The one idea underneath all of it

AudLit never overwrites your recording. Your raw take stays on disk exactly as you performed it, and every step writes a new file beside it:

They all land in the audio folder you chose when you created the project. If a step goes wrong you delete the derivative and run that step again from the raw take. You cannot lose a performance this way, and that is deliberate — it is the reason the whole workflow is shaped as it is.

1 · Audio Settings, and the input channel

Pick your microphone. If you record through an interface, also check the input channel. If your XLR is in socket 2, AudLit has to be told that — otherwise it records the empty channel 1 and you get silence while your headphones sound perfect. There is a live meter per input, so watch which one moves when you talk.

2 · Calibration

Read the passage it gives you for thirty seconds. This measures your voice and configures the mastering chain for you. At the end you get a pass/fail scorecard against your output spec — which tells you before you record a whole chapter whether your room will deliver.

3 · Room tone

Record a few seconds of your silent booth. AudLit uses this to fill the gaps it creates when it removes a retake, so an edit sounds like your room rather than like digital silence. It stops on its own once the level is steady. Capture it in the same session, at the same gain, as you record.

4 · Scroll speed

Read a short passage so the teleprompter learns your pace. If you use the same booth every day, steps 2 through 4 are genuinely a one-time thing per project.

Press R or the Record button. The teleprompter scrolls, and in Follow mode it listens and follows your voice rather than running on a timer.

When you fumble a line — mark a retake

1. Stop reading.
2. Press Enter. A green Retake marked cue flashes.
3. Go back to the start of that sentence and read it again.
4. Carry on.

Do not stop the recording. Do not start a new take. Mark it and re-read. Later, Clean up finds both readings and keeps the good one. This is the single most important habit in the app, and everything downstream is built around it.

Recording a chapter across several sessions

Record each part as its own take, then use Assemble Take in the Takes group to join them in order before you analyze. Assemble puts a proper gap between the parts so the cleanup engine treats them correctly. Do not clean them separately.

Press Analyze. This transcribes your take and builds a word-by-word map of where every word sits in the audio.

That map is what cleanup, punch-in, the waveform editor and text selection all run on. If a feature looks greyed out or does nothing, it is almost always because the take has not been analyzed yet.

Afterwards you get an issue list — words that did not match your script. Click any one to jump both the teleprompter and the audio to it. Some are real misreads; many are just the transcriber mishearing a name. You do not have to act on them. They are a reading aid.

Press Clean up this take.

What it does: reads your script, finds every place you read something twice, keeps the good reading, removes the fumble, and evens out the pauses between paragraphs so the chapter breathes consistently. It also trims the dead air at the head and tail.

What it does not do: it never cuts inside a paragraph you read cleanly, and it does not touch a file on disk until you press Save.

When it finishes you get two tabs in the waveform dock: Original (your raw take) and Cleaned (the result). Listen to the Cleaned tab.

Gap timing — the fastest way to make a chapter sound like you

There are sliders for sentence, paragraph and heading gaps. AudLit also shows the natural gap it measured from your own reading, with a Use this button. Change a value and press Re-run Cleanup with new gaps — it reprocesses immediately, with no re-recording.

Individual gaps

Between any two paragraphs in the script view there is a thin gap line. Click it to nudge that one gap by ±100 ms or ±250 ms, or type an exact number. Useful for a dramatic beat before a chapter’s last line.

Press Save Cleaned when you are happy. That writes _cleaned.wav.

Three tools, in the order you will use them.

A · Punch-In Re-Record, for re-performing a passage

1. In the Fix & Edit group, press Punch-In Re-Record. Or select the text in the teleprompter, open the Edit tab on the toolbar that appears, and press Re-record — that works on a word, a sentence, a range of sentences or a whole paragraph, and it works out which you meant.
2. AudLit plays you a pre-roll: the seconds of your own audio leading into that spot, so you match your energy and pace.
3. A banner counts the pre-roll down, then turns red and says Record now. Read the passage.
4. Press Preview Splice. It plays you the join.
5. If the join is slightly off, drag the four bracket handles in the visual editor — or use the nudge buttons (−50 / −10 / +10 / +50 ms) — and preview again. Nothing is committed until you accept.
6. Press Accept Splice. It re-analyzes automatically so the word map matches the new audio.

B · The waveform editor, for surgical fixes

Press the expand icon on the waveform to go full screen. Select a region and Delete, Trim or insert Silence, with undo and redo.

You can also drive it from the script: select words in the teleprompter and AudLit finds and highlights them in the waveform for you. That is usually easier than hunting visually — select “the cat sat on the mat”, see exactly where it is, delete it if you want. Press Save Edits to write _edited.wav.

C · Notes to yourself, for a pass you do later

Select text, open the Edit tab, press Add Note — and optionally record a voice memo with it (“this is pronounced KAI-ro”). It appears in the sidebar list.

Then press Queue next to Punch-In Re-Record and AudLit walks you through every open note in order: it navigates to each one, arms the punch-in, and moves on when you accept. This is the efficient way to fix a whole chapter — mark everything on one listen-through, then do them all in a single pass.

Press Master. AudLit runs the full chain against whichever output spec the project is set to.

At the top of the panel is a card naming exactly which file it is about to master — Edited before Cleaned before Raw. Glance at it. After several edits it is the quickest way to confirm you are mastering the right version.

You then get a compliance report. For ACX:

Then Save WAV and Save MP3. The MP3 is your ACX upload.

Approving marks the chapter final and locks it. Nothing is emailed to anyone unless you have reviewers set up on the project — and the panel tells you which case you are in before you press it. You can reopen an approved chapter from the Master & Deliver group if you need to.

1 · A bad import costs more than a bad take

Everything downstream compares your audio against the text AudLit holds. If a chapter imported as one giant paragraph, or two chapters fused into one, cleanup has the wrong map and will behave oddly in ways that look like an audio problem. Spend five minutes on the import preview. It is the cheapest time you will ever spend.

2 · Work from the raw take

If a chapter sounds wrong, do not clean the cleaned file — go back to _take01.wav and clean that again. AudLit handles this for you automatically now, but it is the right mental model, and it is why the raw take is never deleted.

3 · Room tone is a snapshot, not a fact about your room

If the air conditioning starts halfway through a session, the room tone you captured cold no longer matches what you are recording. There is a ten-second Check room button on the Record tab — use it at the start of a session rather than trusting last week’s capture.