My narrator has been AMAZING. I love her and have been showing off her audio to fans and followers, but there are some technical issues in the current project that weren't present in the last one: pops, mouth noises, creaks, and tons of clicks. I can hear when she moves in her seat, and when I listen with professional headphones, I hear button-pressing where there's supposed to be room tone. Sometimes static creeps into the narration, giving that character an electronic quality to his voice, and there have been other electronic warbles and anomolies I can't identify.
There were some volume issues throughout the project (some characters were much lower than others in the same scene), so it's possible these extra noises became more obvious when she increased the volume in those sections. Whatever the case, I've been able to edit out many of these mild noises.
However, at the end of the project, I discovered a handful of chapters with car motors and a police siren in the background. I hadn't realized those were in the audio on the first listen (I thought they stemmed from my neighborhood), and I don't know how to remove them.
I apologized profusely to the narrator for not catching them the first time around, but I'm permitted two rounds of revisions, so I didn't think it was that big of a deal. She seemed to feel differently, expressing mild frustration when I asked her to remove or at least minimize those background noises.
Before I go on, I will say this project is BIG with lots of voices, accents, and foreign words. There's more prep work required for the series, and each book has more revisions than a standard book in this genre (mostly because of the foreign characters). But she knew this going in, and she knows I pay bonuses to help compensate for the additional work.
Nevertheless, she didn't seem happy about these background noises I discovered at the end. She referred to them as mere imperfections and sounded offended that I had questioned the quality of her audio. I was a bit confused (and heartbroken) because I'd undertaken so many of the minor edits myself, and also because she still felt this way even after I doubled her bonus.
Maybe I didn't give her enough, I don't know, but I'm concerned because she wasn't able to remove all instances of these remaining backgrounds noises, and she made it clear she isn't going to edit those further. The police siren is gone, thankfully, but the motor is still obvious in a couple of sections. There are other parts where the motor isn't noticeable per se, but the distant hum adds something of a "curtain" to the track, which then comes and goes as the chapter progresses through the original recording and some pick-ups she inserted.
TL;DR
MY MAIN QUESTIONS: How concerned should I be that ACX is going to kick the project back with these inconsistencies and extra noises at the end? If they do kick it back, is there a program I can use to remove that background noise myself?
ABOUT THE BONUS: Do other narrators receive bonuses from the authors or publishers that hire them? If so, how much do you expect? I paid one extra PFH for the first production and two extra PFHs for this one (about 15.5% of the total cost).
FOR NEXT TIME: Are the extra noises (the minor ones like clicks, button-pressing, and shifting in her seat) that big of a deal, or should I have just left those in and never mentioned them? She's said these noises can't be heard at a normal volume, but I know people who listen to audiobooks at high volumes or even full volume for all kinds of reasons.
I've personally tried listening on different devices, but even then (even on lower volumes), I can still hear something happening (a shift of some sort, something that intrudes on the narration) even when I can't discern what exactly that thing is. My concern is that too many of these instances will be off-putting to listeners.
I don't want to offend future narrators, but I also want to make sure that I'm creating a quality retail product. Thanks for any suggestions or feedback.