Sunday, July 22, 2007

Tips for Creating Online Voice Audio

If you are looking to create audio for some copy (narration, audio book, or other set-length piece of material), you may have no time-constraints at all. If this is the case, there are a few other factors to think about in the audio recording part.

If the material is to be posted online, consider that the size of the download can affect the speed of retrieval for the end user. If you cannot reduce the size of the file to acceptable levels, you can choose to break the audio into sections (or chapters) for individual downloads.

Also choose how the data is to be stored, or what format you want it sent to you in directly from the voice over artist. Most people choose to receive it via email in MP3 format or FTP to a website via MP3, WAV, AIF, WMA or AVI/MPEG audio. But most VO Professionals can also simply burn a CD and send it to you, or schedule an ISDN phone patch session.

If the material end-product is to be recorded onto CD for distribution, keep in mind the average space on a CD is around 700MB, or 80 minutes (the equivalent of about 12-16 songs). If not all material will fit on just one CD, you can obviously use more than one CD, in which case you should balance the material on the CDs so there’s not one 80 minute CD and one 20 minute – preferably have two 50-minute discs.