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If you want to learn about Converting your articles and/or eBooks to Audio products, this is a good place to start. Why would converting these products be of benefit to you and your business?

• Almost anyone can create an audio product. (If they know how to proceed)
• Most marketers won’t do it. (So you are already ahead of the game if you do)
• Most marketers don’t use the right techniques. (They don’t have or ever have considered using a director/producer)

Here are a few tips you should be able to apply right away, which will give you a good start at converting articles and eBooks into quality audio recordings.

If you can understand that almost anyone can create an audio product, then you will have the confidence to make your product a success. You just need to know the process.

The equipment you will need is important. Now you probably know or already have a good microphone and audio recording software, but did you consider your “studio environment”. By studio environment I mean a place or room that:

• Is quiet
• Not to big and has very little or no echo
• Has a chair that is comfortable, but in which you can sit in an upright position
• And has a music stand or table top for your script.

Once you have set this up. You now have your “studio” that you will record in.

Now… How do you improve your read?

Here are a few techniques directors use and you can use right away, to improve your audio narration.

Pretend to talk to someone across from you - A big mistake that most non-professional narrators do when reading a script is reading to a “crowd”. In most cases 1 person is listening to your narration at a time. So imagine that you are explaining your content to a friend or business associate. Be conversational and not just read the text.

A mirror in hand — When I was recording voice-overs in professional sound studios, we didn’t always work with professional narrators. And the best way to get someone to give the right style of read was to have them read a few lines while referring back to their facial expression while reading.

For example, a serious read put on a serious facial expression, upbeat and happy, then smile while you read, etc.

Use hand gestures — Be free with your hands. Use them to express yourself as you read. This will give more dynamic variation in the read. This is one reason why these article to audio software programs don’t really cut it… unless you are only interested in making a one time sale and then having customers who are less than impressed.

Also, print out your script and go over it and add or remove anything that will help you accomplish a better read.

Bonus tip: Don’t be afraid to use some natural pauses and put in a few seconds pause after a main point that you want your listener to really absorb.

Now this brings us to why most marketers won’t do it:

• Lack of confidence in their own voice
• Too time consuming
• Too much work

However, you now know that a few of the principal “director’s techniques” will build your confidence. And these same techniques can also be applied to on-camera narration in video. So get yourself setup and start applying these tips for better quality recordings.

How to set up a home recording studio can depend on the location, the walls, even what’s under and above the room. These are 4 tips I personally utilize in my own home studio, as well as my studio away from home. You’ve came to the perfect place to find more helpful information for your home recording studio whether you’re a rookie or a rookie veteran.

1. Save Your Money!

Do not spend your rent money on studio equipment like many people do. This is a very common problem because people feel the need to go after their dreams by risking all of their expenses. They do this with the hopes of getting all their money back in a short period of time. Very seldom does this situation turn out the way people want it to. Start small and finish big.

2. Where to Begin?

Keep it simple when you’re just beginning. Purchase a good computer if you don’t already have one. You need good music production software, a condenser microphone, and a mixer. This is all I needed to get started. More information on this below.

3. Food

A great way to attract people to your studio is a refrigerator. Yes, a mini or large refrigerator will keep your musicians and artists coming back to pay you. People will choose your studio over many others because of this great product that keeps people alive, food. Moreover, you don’t want to have everyone walking around your house, going into the kitchen, and waking people up in the middle of the night to get bottled water. Keep your refrigerator conveniently right next to your sitting area.

4. Water

Many public speakers drink room temperature water before they get up to speak. This same method can be used for your artists. To prevent the redundant throat clearing and overly excessive recording of tracks, drinking warm water is essential.

Bonus Tip

A bonus tip on how to set up a home recording studio is installing carpet in the room. This helps with eating up the sound waves so they don’t bounce all around the room back into your microphone.

Web Audio Plus is a software program that converts your audio files into a file that you can use on your web site that will stream. Web Audio Plus is a great little program that I like a lot and use almost every day.

This program is super simple to use and has a few easy steps to produce a finished streaming audio file complete with buttons ready to insert in your website.

Overview

Basically to use Web Audio plus you have to either use a microphone and record your audio into Web Audio Plus or load an mp3 or wav file into the program.

Upload your audio file the program creates to your web server.

Copy and paste the code Web Audio Plus generates for you into your web page.

Steps To Take For A finished Streaming Audio File

Select Recording Device: The first thing you need to do is decide whether you are going to record your audio from within the software or import an already recorded file.

If you decide to record from within click next and hit the record button and start recording. When you are happy with the recording hit stop and play back your new recording.

Choosing a file you have already recorded to upload is as simple as browsing for your file and clicking open.

Which method you choose to get your audio into the program is up to you but I have found the medium quality works well. This is a good compromise between file size and sound quality.

Choose Buttons: Your next task is to choose the buttons you would like to use. You have lots of choices in color so pick a color and style that will look good with your website design. The color chart on the left is what color the button will be and on the right is what color the background will be.

There is a preview button near the bottom to see what your choice will look like.

Review Options: This screen will let you choose where to save your finished file and what size the buttons will be. The default on the button size is 200 by 73. I usually change this to 100 by 73 as I think it looks better.

Pick the location where you want to save your finished file. The default is your desktop, which is ok with me, then copy your html code by clicking the button. Click the make button and like magic your streaming audio buttons are ready for use.

Upload your finished files to your website and change the location in your code to reflect the path where you are storing the files and you are good to go.

Copy the code Web Audio Plus provides into your web page and your website should talk or sing.

Recording an MP3 allows musicians to sell music directly to their fans, without going through the “middle management” layer of a record company.

Now, you still have to have a good sound, and good production values to make an MP3 file work right – like anything with music recording, the studio time, and the post production time, is critical to your success. In case it’s been a while since you kicked it out in a studio, let’s run through the basics.

Quality input determines the quality of your sound output. Quality input depends a lot on the recording environment; MP3′s encoding means that a less than perfect recording will get significantly worse after digitization. So, make sure when recording an MP3, that the sound quality of your studio is as good as you can make it; it’s worth it to spend the time to do some sample recordings and stamp out the dead spots.

Next to sound absorbers and reflectors on the walls to kill unwanted echoes, it’s your microphone that drives your recording quality. Get good microphones; you’ll want a good condenser microphone in front of your lead singer, and two dynamic range microphones near your instruments. Like anything that has to deal with music, as you get more experience, your microphone collection will grow. (In particular, mic’ing your drum kit is going to be a fascinating experience.)

Placement of your microphones for a good recording is a mixture of science and acoustics, and art – and is something you’ll spend a lot time of trial and error. Take a look at general articles on studio setup to get the most out of this, and measure your recording area carefully. It’s amazing what a couple of feet of placement can do. No one ever said recording an MP3 was going to be easy, but believe me, in the end… will be well worth the effort.

Once the gear is set up, decide how many tracks you plan on laying down. 4 is the minimum; fortunately, modern digital recording gear lets you do this with a heck of a lot less hassle and fuss than you’d expect even from five years ago. Apple’s GarageBand software allows 12 tracks with trivial ease, and is a far cry from recording on 2″ tape. As always, it’s the time at the mixing boards that eats album creation. Look into setting your fades, and cross track and timing beats down early and work from within them.

Getting your recording from the studio equipment to your computer for MP3 conversions depends a lot on what you recorded it on. If you used MiniDisc, or most digital formats, then it’s already on a hard drive and you can just use digital audio in to move it over. You’ll either use an S/PDIF cable or a firewire cable for this, since the raw files are huge. If you’re stuck with an analog recording, most sound cards have analog input. You’re going to spend a lot of time cleaning up an analog signal going through your soundcard, and you need to be careful about clipping off the highs and flattening out the middles. It’s almost always better to go straight digital across the board. Saves you time, gets a higher quality output, and is easier to deal with.

Once you’ve got your digital music down, it’s time to rip it to an MP3. Now, MP3 as a format that doesn’t support multi-track audio beyond stereo sound, so be sure to convert down to that when you’ve got it to the stage you need it at. You’ll also need to select a bit rate, which is a measure of how much data is played per second, and directly impacts sound quality and file size.

If you’re trying to capture CD-quality sound, lots of track overlays and a complex arrangement, look at 192 kb/sec. It’s a large file size, but everything you want in the music will be in the download. Standard for most digital music is 144 or 128 kb/sec. If you’re recording an interview with just people talking, or people reading text (such as an audio book), you can (with a good, quiet recording area) make a lot of progress with 64 kb/sec bit rates to kind of give you a comparison.

Can you keep the rights to your audio interviews? There is no reason you would have to give up the publication rights to your audio. I mean why would you? There may be a case where if you got an interview with someone that they said you can’t have the rights to do anything with the interview, but why would they be giving you the interview if they didn’t want promotion. It would be understood that once you have the interview you are going to use that as a tool to get them publicity.

So you are going to have to be in control of the distribution of your interview to get them more business or more notoriety or better distribution. So that part of it if you needed the rights to that interview and you wanted to use it to promote them or use it to sell a product you have to maybe get that as an understanding up front. But I don’t think there is really any reason someone should withhold the publication rights. I guess it all depends. I’ve never had a problem with it in the past.

So for any guy who says they are not going to give you the publication rights there are probably 20 other experts in that field who would be willing to, just move on to someone else. There are plenty of people to interview, plenty of experts. That’s my answer on that; if they aren’t willing to give you the rights then you should find someone else who is.