All right, Aniroo, I just listened to the entire story.
First some praise: as to your reading, there's no fault in it.
I love the expressiveness with which you read. Especially the despair of the wife at the beginning and later the aged Queen mother was really heart-rending. Also the Devil sounds really evil when he speaks to the miller about his daughter. All the characters are well acted out, this makes it very lively and entertaining to listen to. So you already have the best tool to make great recordings: your voice and your narrative qualities.
Now a few PL notes. Don't get a shock when you see the long text, it's actually not that much to correct, only I have trouble keeping myself short in my comments
I try to write it all up as precise as possible, as I don't know how much you already know, as a newbie.
> What we need to work on to make the listening experience even better are some
technical issues which need to be corrected though:
1) the recording is a bit
too loud (93.3 dB) while we need to stay inside 86 and 92 dB, with a preferred average of 89 dB. Could you de-amplify by at least 3 dB please ? In Audacity, highlight the entire recording, go to Effect - Amplify and input - 3 (don't forget the MINUS sign) in the slot and press OK
2) the
background noise is indeed VERY high. In order to listen to it I had to noise clean quite a bit to make it agreeable to the ear. Well once you de-amplified it all, the noise will be less as well, but still I think a round of noise cleaning wouldn't hurt. Are you using Audacity ? The highlight a portion of the room-noise at the end of your recording - go to Effect - Noise Reduction - Press first Get Noise sample - then highlight the entire recording - again Effect - Noise Reduction and then press OK. Audacity does the rest.
And to answer your question: yes the noise cleaning needs to be done BEFORE exporting it to mp3
Maybe it would help if you could put the input level of your microphone to a lower level, that way to begin with the background noise picked up by the mic might already be less.
I would try that with your next recording
3) you have over
3 seconds at the beginning before you start, this feels a bit long. Usually we have between 0.5 and 1 second maximum. Could you cut off 2 seconds at the beginning please ?
Likewise the
End silence should be 5 seconds, you have 4, which is ok for once, but be careful to not let it get even less
> Concerning the
Intro and outro disclaimer:
we all use a
Standardized Intro disclaimer, as per Point 7 in the first Post: No need to say the title right at the beginning, and you wording is a bit different. Please say the following:
Story 31 of Household Tales. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit: librivox DOT org
Recording by [your name], [city, your blog, podcast, web address] (optional)
"Household Tales, by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm. Translated by Margaret Hunt. The Girl without hands
likewise, in the
end disclaimer we need not repeat the title. Simply say "End of Story 31." and the rest you can cut out
> and now to the
text proper, as I said, all in all, very beautifully read and not many errors. However there are a few sentences that would need a bit of tweaking:
>
at 3:23: "and in my
terror I have promised to do it" - stumble and repeat at "terror"
>
at 4:14: "Thereupon she caused her maimed
arms to be bound to her back" - "arms" not "hands" as she actually doesn't have hands anymore
>
at 4:50: "else must
I die of hunger" - stumble and repeat of "I"
>
at 4:56: "
And suddenly an angel came towards her" - stumble at "And"
>
at 10:12: "Then
said the poor woman" - you forgot to say "said", which makes the sentence a bit strange
>
at 11:21: "and took
these tokens from it" - stumble and repeat at "these"
>
at 13:45: "He is not
my father" - you say "thy", but it's actually the son saying this
> Once you have corrected all these issues please upload with the exact
file name as stated under Point 8 in the first Post of this project "householdtales_031_grimm_128kb (you forgot a _ between grimm and 128)
If there are any questions, don't hesitate to ask. This might seem a lot to take in for the beginning, but believe me, it will get easier with each recording. The main issue really is the noise cleaning, all the rest is only "cosmetics".
Sonia
I'm impressed - this project isn't even two months since launch! Thanks especially to Sonia, our very prompt and encouraging DPL!