You hear one loud inhale, then suddenly you're noticing every breath in the chapter. The temptation is to start cutting them all out. I don't think that's always the best move.
A breath isn't automatically a mistake. It's part of how people speak, and in an audiobook it can be part of the pacing and performance as well. At the same time, a really obvious close-mic inhale every few sentences can get tiring very quickly.
There isn't one correct way to deal with them. Some narrators like a very clean read with almost no audible breathing. Others barely touch them. A lot of people will fall somewhere in between.
I tend to prefer reducing the breaths that actually draw attention to themselves and leaving the rest alone.
Quiet breaths usually aren't the problem
A normal inhalation between sentences generally doesn't bother me.
If it's sitting naturally underneath the narration, the listener probably isn't thinking about it at all. Removing it can sometimes make the gap between two lines feel stranger than the breath ever did.
This is especially true with audiobooks because you're listening to the same voice for hours.
A commercial voiceover can be incredibly tight and polished because it might only last 20 or 30 seconds. With long-form narration, a completely breathless voice can start to feel a bit unnatural.
A little bit of breathing is one of the things that reminds you there is an actual person performing the book.
The breaths I'd normally want to deal with are the ones that jump forward suddenly.
A close-mic inhale can sound huge on headphones. If the narration is fairly quiet and then every sentence is followed by a sharp breath right in your ear, it starts competing with the words.
Often you don't need to remove it completely. Just turning it down is enough.
Why I usually prefer reduction to removal
This is why the Subtle breath setting in Optivox reduces detected breaths by 6 dB rather than deleting them.
Six decibels is enough to make a noticeable breath sit further back without completely changing the rhythm of the line.
For a lot of audiobook material, that's where I'd start.
You still hear the narrator breathing, but you're much less likely to become aware of every inhale.
That said, this is taste.
Some narrators genuinely prefer a much cleaner sound. If you've listened back and decided you don't want audible breaths in your work, that's completely valid too.
The important bit is knowing that stronger breath reduction comes with a trade-off. Once you start removing everything, you need to pay more attention to the breaths that were doing something useful.
A gasp is not the same thing as a breath between sentences
This is where automatic processing can only go so far.
Imagine a character has just run into a room and gasps before speaking. Or they take a shaky breath before delivering an emotional line.
Technically, those are breaths.
Editorially, they're part of the performance.
The same applies to a narrator deliberately pausing, catching their breath or using an inhale to change the feel of the next sentence.
Software can identify something that looks or sounds like a breath. It can't always know why that breath is there.
That's one of the reasons I wouldn't blindly apply maximum breath reduction to a chapter and assume the job is finished.
Off, Subtle or Max?
Optivox has three breath settings because I don't think the software should make this choice for you.
Off leaves breaths alone. I'd use this when the performance contains a lot of deliberate breathing, or when you want to make every decision manually.
Subtle reduces detected breaths by 6 dB. For natural audiobook narration, this is probably the setting I'd reach for most often. The breath is still there, just less distracting.
Max reduces breaths as far as possible. That can work well if you like a very clean sound, but I'd listen through afterwards because intentional breaths may get caught as well.
None of the three is the “correct” audiobook setting.
They're different starting points.
You can also mix the processed and raw recordings
If you like the cleanliness of Max but you've got a performance with a few important breaths or gasps, there's a fairly simple workaround.
Keep your original recording underneath the processed one.
Process the chapter with stronger breath reduction, then listen back against the raw recording. If you get to an inhale, gasp or performance breath that you want to keep, copy that moment from the raw track back into the processed version.
You get the speed of automatically reducing hundreds of routine breaths without losing the handful that actually matter.
You can take the same approach with Subtle. If a particular breath has been reduced too much, just bring that one back up.
I'd much rather do that than manually draw gain changes around every ordinary breath in an hour-long chapter.
Different books can call for different choices
I also wouldn't treat every audiobook exactly the same way.
With straightforward non-fiction, I might lean a little more towards consistency. The listener is trying to follow the information, so obvious breaths can become unnecessary distractions.
With fiction, especially something intimate or character-driven, I'd usually be more cautious.
Romance is an obvious example. If the narrator is deliberately close and intimate, some of those little breaths can help the performance rather than hurt it.
Fantasy or dramatic fiction can be similar. If the narrator is moving between characters, emotion and different levels of intensity, automatically stripping out every inhale can remove some of that texture.
Again, this isn't really a technical rule. It's just listening to what the performance is trying to do.
Stop soloing the breaths
One thing I'd avoid is judging every breath on its own.
If you isolate an inhale and turn your attention completely towards it, almost every breath starts sounding too loud.
That's not how somebody listens to an audiobook.
Listen to the paragraph.
If you don't notice the breath while you're following the story, it probably isn't much of a problem.
If the same inhale keeps pulling your attention away from the narration, reduce it.
I find that a much more useful test than trying to make every gap in the waveform look perfectly clean.
This ties into the same issue with noise reduction more generally. You can keep processing until the recording looks and sounds technically spotless, then realise you've made the voice feel flatter and less natural in the process.
Our guide to How much noise reduction is too much for audiobook narration? goes further into that.
It really is personal taste
I don't think there's a universal target for how much breathing an audiobook should contain.
One narrator might listen to the exact same chapter and want almost every breath gone. Another might prefer to leave nearly all of them.
Both can sound good.
Personally, I'd start from the assumption that normal quiet breaths are fine, reduce the ones that genuinely distract me, and be very careful around anything that feels like part of the performance.
The software can handle the boring bit of finding and reducing breaths.
You still have to decide which ones actually belong in the story.