It's been strangely gratifying to see LibriVox recordings I've made for sale on EBay (What? Hadn't you noticed that yet?) "Strangely" because all LibriVox audiobooks are free for download from www.archive.org. But if people want to burn those downloads onto CDs and offer them for sale, that is actually an activity we LV'ers encourage, since not everyone has the patience for what can be long downloads.
Add to EBay a new outlet: http://www.travelingclassics.com/
Traveling Classics is a new application for your iPhone or iPod Touch which reads a classic book to you while scrolling the text on the screen, synchronized to the narration. As an application available at the iTunes AppStore, Traveling Classics has to submit all its intended content to Apple for permission.
On its opening day, February 12, Traveling Classics launched with eight audiobooks, one of which was my "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." So now, for a limited time only, you can have me read to you for over seven hours for 99 cents!
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304223424&mt=8
Cool, huh? Not quite free... but the feeling that gives me: priceless!
Sorry for the random post, but I can't track down your email address.
ReplyDeleteI'm researching an article for Gelfmagazine.com about the Kindle, which has new a new automated read aloud feature.
As a reader of audiobooks, your insight would be much appreciated.
If you're interested, please email me Benjamin_inquiry@me.com
Many thanks,
Benjamin
What is your recording set up like, and what is the recording process like? If someone who has never doing audiobook or long format voice recording before what are something’s you would recommend? I have some experience in editing sound but only in Final Cut Pro.
ReplyDeleteI've used 4 or 5 set-ups over the last 19 years. None involved a professional studio, and meeting a pro's requirements during the few years I tested that out was really difficult. (A certain technical director wanted me thrown off the narrator list at his company... BEFORE an author requested me particularly to do two of her books!)
DeleteI use a walk-in closet that is fully interior to the house, giving me decent separation from airplanes, lawn mowers, motorcycles, etc.. I have put anechoic foam on hard surfaces (door, ceiling, wall), trusting to hanging clothes for the rest of echo suppression. (Clap your hands loudly; if you get any sense of an echo, you need to deaden it.) I also have a hemispherical enclosure for my microphone because I already had it. Most important was a tight-fitting door sweep, to keep noises from coming in under the door.
I've used a succession of mics. I've never wanted to go with the "pro" type, needing ghost power (which I've never understood) and special cabling, plus mixer and equalizer. I use a Shure USB mic, and I lead the cable through a gap in the door sweep to a laptop set up outside the closet. That way, I don't pick up the laptop's fan noise. I of course use a pop filter.
I do not use headphones while recording, and question why anyone would. I'm 100% into the recording, and I won't spare effort to be audio engineer at the same time. I know when I mess up and need to re-read a sentence, and I almost always catch vagrant noises that find their way inside, or that I make.
I edit in Audacity. I'm self-taught. I tried punch-and-roll; don't like it. If I don't like a passage during my 100% edit, I do it again and splice it in. Intermediate storage is in FLAC format (lossless, and half the size of WAV) and MP3 is only encoded from the final edited version. (Don't edit MP3 files. This degrades their sound, even in untouched portions.)
Hope this helps!
I also wanted to say that I take 4 - 4.5 hours to produce 1 hour of finished audio. This doesn't include a pre-reading; 90% of the books I've read have been cold reads. (I've gotten good at reacting on the fly!)
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