Fun with audio

It's a busy time right now. 

I just finished the final edits on the third book in the Tudor Court series and submitted it to the publisher. While I wait for them to look it over again, I'm working on the audiobook for A Wider World. As I work, I am ever more grateful for my years of volunteering with local theater, because it has given me a pool of actors to barter with. 

This book is turning out to be easier than Songbird, probably because it's more recently written and edited, and I don't have to read along at quite the same level this time. I know these words; I've been over them half a dozen times in the last year. Some parts of Songbird were so old that they surprised me when I heard Jen read them out for the first time. 

The actor and I have a system going. He records several chapters and uploads them to a shared Google drive. I download and listen to them through Audacity, which is a fabulous free audio recording/editing software. I do basic cleanup then, looking for background noise or breath sounds, but what I'm mainly listening for are mistakes or mispronunciations or incorrect emphasis. 

I make notes of the sentences that need re-recording and send them back to him. When he does those edits, I can then cut and paste them - just like in Word - into the original audio file. After that, I check the levels to make sure that they're even, divide the files into chapters, and put the correct, Audible-mandated amount of blank space at the beginning and end. Then I convert them into .wav files.

Once that's done, I upload the files into another shared folder (this time with my publisher), and they'll take it from there for final mastering. It's more of a process than many authors with publishers go through, but they understand my control freak tendencies, and I really enjoy being involved in all levels of the production process. 

Eventually, when I self-publish my 1930s book, I want to be able to do all the steps myself - other than logical things like paying for cover art, etc. I might know what I want, and I might know the trends, but I don't have the graphic design background to make it good enough. My time is better spent on words than pictures. Part of being an effective control freak is knowing when somebody else does something better than you do. 

I guess that's also called delegating.