AUDIO BOOKS
Spurred on by a colleague who told me that he liked to "read" while walking the dog, I've decided to have a go at turning my novels into audio books. I think it's going to take some time!
Amazon have a subsidiary called Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) which allows authors to upload MP3 files of their books and then sells them and give the authors royalties. So far, so good. The question then is: how do you make the MP3 file?
Of course, you can pay ACX to find people to make the recording for you, but then you have to be pretty confident of selling enough copies to recover the cost. So I'm going for the do-it-yourself option.
The difficulty there is that the ACX techical specification are ... well ... technical!
I've found a piece of free software called Audacity that has enabled me to record the first chapter of Changing Scenes of Life. (The link below should allow you to have a listen and tell me what you think.) It also has editing features to remove noise and set the maximum peak volume level. what it doesn't have is a way of measuring the Root Mean Square (RMS) volume level.
It took me ages to hunt down a way of doing this. In the end I found an entry on the Audacity users forum that gave a link to a plug-in that not only measures RMS, but actually does a check of all the other ACX requirements.
So. now I know for certain that my first test file doesn't comply!
I think I'm allowing myself to put to much drama into the reading, which is making the volume vary too much. This means that, once I've normalised the volume to prevent the peaks going over -3dB, the RMS is below the required -23 to -18 RMS band. I must try to remember that I'm not supposed to be projecting my voice from the pulpit, but speaking gently into the reader's ear! I think that I also don;t need to speak quite so slowly or to be so careful about sounding my consonants clearly - I think I come across like a rather posh Primary School Teacher speaking to some rather slow-on-the-uptake infants. (Maybe reminiscent of Joyce Grefell's nursery class!)