Put Your Characters in the Room: Stage Every Voice in Radio Novel

Close your eyes and listen to a good radio drama. The voices aren't all stuck in the middle of your head. The detective sits across the table. The phone call is thin and far away. A shout comes from the end of the hall, and you can almost tell how big the room is.

Most AI narration sounds like everyone standing in one spot. This update changes that: every voice, sound effect and piece of music in your story can now be placed on a stage - where it sits, how it sounds, how far away it feels.

Give every voice a place

Open a finished audio production, go to the Track Editor, and choose Audio Settings. Every voice in your story gets its own card, along with Foley, Ambience and Music. Each card has:

• Left / Right - slide a character anywhere from fully left to fully right, or tap L, C or R. Side realism makes it convincing: in real life a sound from your left reaches your right ear a fraction of a moment later and a little duller, because your head is in the way. Side realism adds exactly that, so a position sounds like a place, not just one ear turned down.
• Volume and Pitch - make a character louder or softer, higher or lower. Pitch changes the voice without changing how fast it speaks.
• Effects - Phone, Radio, Megaphone, Robot, Muffled (behind a wall), Bass boost, Treble boost, Voice clarity and Warm.
• Echo - a strength slider and a delay slider. Short delays sound like a small room; long ones like a hall or a canyon. The echo rings on into the pause after the line.
• Equalizer - low, mid and high, for shaping a voice.

Every control has a small ? that explains it in plain language.

Set it once, or change just one line

Settings work at two levels. Set them on a track and every line on it follows: put your detective a little left of center with a warm tone, and he stays there for the whole story.

Then change just one line when the scene calls for it. The pencil button on any line, sound effect or music section has an Audio settings section: tick the settings you want to change for that line only, and everything else keeps following the track. A line spoken over a telephone gets the Phone effect; the next line from the same character is back to normal.

Back on the Audio Settings page, each track tells you how many of its lines have their own settings, lists them with their timestamps, and lets you reset one - or all of them - back to the track with a click.

Hear it before you commit

Every card has a Preview button. It plays a line from your script through exactly the processing your final mix will use - pitch, effects, echo and position included - and you choose which line to hear. With "Play after each change" on, it plays as soon as you let go of a slider. In the Track Editor, each line now plays with its settings applied too, so you can listen through the whole story as you work.

Your originally generated audio is never altered. Settings are applied when your final mix is rebuilt, and rebuilding from your saved audio doesn't use up regenerations, so you can experiment freely and reset whenever you like.

A note about listening

Stage placement is at its best on headphones. On a single speaker the sound folds into one channel; voices stay clear, and the Side realism slider lets you turn that effect down if a placed voice sounds a little hollow there.

Placing voices left or right makes that chapter's finished audio stereo. Before you submit a book, check the store's current requirements for mono and stereo files, and keep every chapter of a book consistent.

Also new

Master Audio Settings now has distributor presets. Choose Author's Republic, ACX or Custom, and the values those platforms ask for are filled in: bitrate, room tone at the start and end of the audio, loudness and peak limits. Audio now defaults to a 192 kbps constant bitrate MP3, with a choice of 128 to 320 kbps if a platform wants something different. A measured report shows how your mix compares, check by check.

Every version of your audio is kept. The Tracks tab lists every rebuild, newest first, each with its date, its own player, how it measured and its own download.

Title segments - free. In any audio production group, Add Title Segment lets you create a Story Intro, Chapter Intro, Story Credits or a free-form announcement. Fill in a short form and the text is written for you (you can edit it), pick a voice, and it's generated - free, with no quote, up to a minute each. The narrator credit always says it's an AI voice, for example "Narrated by Jonathan, an AI voice." Title segments sit in your group beside your chapters, have their own Master Audio Settings, and are included when you publish your group as an LPF audiobook.

Smaller things. An Add to Group link on ungrouped audio productions, links between Audio Productions, Video Productions and Projects, and tidier lists and menus.

Important: this is not a guarantee

Meeting a publisher's sound standards does not relieve you of the obligation to meet that publisher's publishing policies on AI disclosure, and it does not guarantee acceptance.

Presets and checks are a guide to common technical requirements. They are not an approval from any platform. Each distributor sets its own rules, including how AI narration must be disclosed, and those rules change. Read the platform's current technical requirements and its current policy on AI narration before you submit, and follow them. You are responsible for what you submit and for the terms you agree to when you publish.

Try it

Open a finished audio production, choose Track Editor, then Audio Settings. Move your narrator to the center, put a second character a little to one side, give a phone call its own sound, and press Preview. Then listen to a chapter with headphones on.

We'd love to hear what you build - and if a platform's checks flag something these tools should have caught, tell us.