Showing posts with label how to make an audiobook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label how to make an audiobook. Show all posts

Saturday, June 11

How To Record An Audiobook At Home


For months I have been toying with the idea of making an audiobook, but I didn't know how much work would be involved, or whether I could do a recording with the equipment and programs available to me. I started to research the subject and then thought, "Hey! I could do a post about this!"

ACX.com


The first place I looked for information was ACX.com. (If you would like to learn a bit about ACX, here is a link to their FAQ.)  ACX has a great section entitled: Video Lessons and Resources.  On that page are links to five video tutorials that will take you, step by step, through everything you need to set up a recording studio in your home.  The downside for me was that if I followed the advice in these videos I would have to spend hundreds of dollars on new equipment. :-(

My search continued.

Podiobooks.com


The next place I went for information on making an audiobook was podiobooks.com. After clicking various links pretty much at random I came to a page titled: Postcast101 - Creating and Hosting an Audio Podcast. The information on this page is for people intending to transmit their books via an RSS feed so it contains a lot of information not applicable to me, but from what I can tell one can record an audiobook using only:

Your current Mac or PC
A Microphone
Audacity
Levelator
iTunes

If you want to include music anywhere in the audiobook you could take a look at ccMixter.

Tutorials


Here are tutorials that give the nuts and bolts of how to record an audiobook:

Step 1: Creating and Editing an Audio Recording
Step 4: Levelating the Podcast
Step 5: Encoding to MP3 Format

I think I would like to try making an audiobook one day, but it looks like a lot of work. I have a new appreciation for all the folks who have done it.

UPDATE (February 25, 2013): I've written another article that builds on this one:
- How To Record Your Own Audiobook: Setting Up A Home Studio

Other articles you might like:


- Podcasting on the iPad
- How To Write Short Stories
- Michael Hauge On How To Summarize Your Novel