Sometimes people ask me how much I disliked my old job and I tell them I disliked it very much. I tell them how, to make myself feel better about hating my job so much, I would get home and read something aloud to myself. Maybe a Samuel Beckett play, or some Wilde, or some Yeats. My housemate would hear me in my room and think I was insane. Still, as Richard Ellmann said, maturity is finding justification for what, in immaturity, you felt embarrassed about, so I thought I could enlist the blind as an excuse to read books aloud again. I could record the results, and upload them to iTunes. A bit of googling didn’t reveal any blind people in need of my services, but I did find Librivox, which accepts recordings people make at home.
There’s so much advice for beginners out there you actually need a beginner's guide to beginning, which is what I’ve created. They recommend you start by recording and getting feedback on their weekly poem, which is what I did.
1. Go here http://forum.librivox.org/viewforum.php?f=19
2. Go to the thread that begins [Weekly Poetry]
3. Open your recording software. If you, like me, don’t have any, you can download some for free for the Mac here: www.versiontracker.com (search for ‘Audacity’)
4. This will only save files as .auds, which are no good to anyone, so download the unpromising-sounding ‘Lame’ from here http://lame.sourceforge.net/ to turn these files into MP3s.
5. Go over the poem of the week two or three times, then record it, beginning with ‘[poem name] by [poet], read for Librivox.org by [your name]. Then end it with ‘End of poem. This recording is in the public domain’.
6. Rather than saving the file as a .aud, go to File -> Export and save it as an mp3.
7. Register as a user of Librivox. Because they have such problems with spammers, they need a personal email on why you’ve joined. I submitted mine and am waiting on a response…
2. Go to the thread that begins [Weekly Poetry]
3. Open your recording software. If you, like me, don’t have any, you can download some for free for the Mac here: www.versiontracker.com (search for ‘Audacity’)
4. This will only save files as .auds, which are no good to anyone, so download the unpromising-sounding ‘Lame’ from here http://lame.sourceforge.net/ to turn these files into MP3s.
5. Go over the poem of the week two or three times, then record it, beginning with ‘[poem name] by [poet], read for Librivox.org by [your name]. Then end it with ‘End of poem. This recording is in the public domain’.
6. Rather than saving the file as a .aud, go to File -> Export and save it as an mp3.
7. Register as a user of Librivox. Because they have such problems with spammers, they need a personal email on why you’ve joined. I submitted mine and am waiting on a response…
My ultimate aim is to do a recording of all of Oscar Wilde’s ‘De Profundis’. I’ll keep you posted…
***UPDATE*** You can now download my recording of 'De Profundis' for free from the iTunes shop!
***UPDATE*** You can now download my recording of 'De Profundis' for free from the iTunes shop!
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