Audiobook Recording vs. Editing vs. Mastering | Untold Stories
If you’re new to producing an audiobook, the terminology can get confusing fast. Recording, editing, mastering — they’re three separate phases, each with a different purpose, different cost, and different person responsible. Here’s a plain-language breakdown of what each one means and what to expect.
Recording: Capturing the Performance
Recording is the foundation. It’s the session where you sit in a soundproofed booth, in front of a microphone, and read your book aloud. Everything else depends on the quality of what gets captured here.
What happens during recording:
- You read chapter by chapter, straight through
- When you make a mistake, you back up to the start of the sentence and go again — never restart mid-phrase
- Your engineer monitors levels, adjusts your signal, and flags problem takes in real time
- After each chapter, you and your engineer play it back and punch in to fix any mistakes
- You leave with clean, edited audio files — one file per chapter
What recording costs at Untold Stories: $45 per hour, 4-hour minimum ($180 minimum session). After the minimum, additional time is $45/hour.
How long does it take? Plan for 1.5–2 hours of recording time for every 1 finished hour of audio. A 5-hour audiobook typically requires 7.5–10 hours of studio time across multiple sessions.
What recording does NOT include: Recording is not editing or mastering. What you get from a recording session is clean, performance-ready audio — not platform-ready files.
Editing: Cleaning Up the Performance
Editing is the process of cleaning up the raw recording — removing mistakes, false starts, long pauses, mouth noise, and anything else that doesn’t belong in the final file.
At a professional studio with a defined workflow, most editing happens during the session itself through the punch-in process. Your engineer catches problems in real time, and you fix them before you leave. This dramatically reduces — or eliminates — the need for a separate post-session editing pass.
What editing involves:
- Removing flubbed takes and false starts
- Trimming excessive pauses and breath noise
- Ensuring each chapter file starts and ends cleanly
- Assembling takes into a continuous, polished read
Who does the editing? At Untold Stories, the chapter-by-chapter playback and punch-in process means your files are edited as you go. You’re not waiting for a separate editing pass after your session — clean files are the output of every session.
What editing does NOT include: Editing is not mastering. Edited files sound clean but they haven’t been technically processed for platform compliance yet.
Mastering: Preparing Files for Publication
Mastering is the final technical step before you submit your audiobook to a platform. It’s not creative — it’s compliance. Every platform (ACX, Audible, Findaway Voices, etc.) has strict technical specifications your files must meet or they’ll be rejected.
What mastering handles:
- Loudness normalization — bringing every file to -18 to -23 LUFS RMS
- Noise floor optimization — ensuring silence measures at -60 dB RMS or lower
- Peak limiting — preventing any spike above -3 dB
- File formatting — exporting in the correct format (MP3, 192 kbps CBR, 44.1 kHz for ACX)
- Compliance verification — checking every chapter file against platform specs before delivery
What mastering costs at Untold Stories: $150 per finished hour of audio (recording clients only). A 5-hour audiobook = $750 in mastering.
Turnaround: 5–15 business days after recording is complete. Unlimited technical revisions included if a platform rejects files for technical reasons.
What mastering does NOT include: Mastering is not editing. If your files have performance issues — stumbles, inconsistent pacing, content mistakes — those need to be addressed before mastering begins. Mastering processes technically clean files; it doesn’t fix performance problems.
How the Three Phases Work Together
| Phase | What It Does | Who Does It | When It Happens |
| Recording | Captures your performance | You + engineer | In the studio |
| Editing | Cleans up the performance | Engineer (during session) | During/after recording |
| Mastering | Prepares files for platforms | Engineer | After recording is complete |
The quality of each phase affects the next. A clean recording means easier editing. Clean, edited files mean straightforward mastering. Problems that aren’t fixed in recording don’t disappear — they get harder and more expensive to deal with downstream.
This is why recording in a professional studio with a defined workflow matters. At Untold Stories, the recording process is built to deliver edit-ready files by the end of every session — so mastering is a technical step, not a rescue operation.
Do You Need All Three?
Recording: Yes — unless you’re recording at home yourself, which is a separate conversation with its own trade-offs.
Editing: Effectively yes — but at Untold Stories, this is built into the recording session through the punch-in workflow, not billed separately.
Mastering: Only if you’re publishing to ACX, Audible, Findaway Voices, or any other platform with technical requirements. If you’re self-distributing without platform compliance requirements, you may be able to skip it — though mastered files always sound more professional.
One-Stop at Untold Stories
Untold Stories Recordings in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood handles all three phases under one roof. Record your audiobook, leave with clean edited files, and let us master them to platform spec — no handoffs, no coordination with separate engineers, no surprises.
Located at 1007 West 19th Street, Chicago, IL 60608. With 185 five-star Google reviews and experience submitting to ACX, Audible, and independent platforms.
Call (872) 444-6316 to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.
