OK I spent all day Sunday doing this, and I've tried handing it over to the housemate to have the audio quality improved, but there's nothing doing. The equipment I currently have just isn't good enough for me to do as good a job on this as I want to. The thing comes out at 45 minutes long, so there's no way I could do it in one take to eliminate the sudden changes in the background noise, and even doing it in several, there are several bits I'd like to do over. I used to work in a recording studio, so I'm used to having a soundproof room and hiss-free equipment, but trying to record on a laptop's built-in mic, I'm getting a lot of variable fan noise on it. Audio cleaners seem to find that harder to deal with than line hiss, and after processing it's still got some rumbling, and it's affected my Jeeves voice so it sounds more like Sandy Toksvig. Add to that the fact that having done it in several takes, and with re-takes of some scenes, the levels are all over the place and if I try to correct them, it makes the variable volume of the fan noise worse, so it's basically screaming "There's an edit here!" which is bloody offputting when it happens in the middle of a sentence, and is still annoying between scenes. I've been spoiled by the good equipment, I've done edits in the middle of a word before now and it's been undetectable, so it rather took me by surprise just how bad this was when I listened back to it.
If I can get hold of some better equipment then I'll do it over, but I'm not going to post a half-arsed job. There are several lines which I'd like to re-do, but to get it even halfway presentable with this equipment, I'd need to re-record entire scenes, and I think we're getting into diminishing returns here. I'm not entirely happy with my reading, and there's also a few edits I think I need to do to the fic itself in order to make it really work as an audio.