I love Librivox and am finally getting ready to volunteer. I have a technical question: I would like to use a digital recording device (I think a SONY ICD-UX533BLK). In the specs it says: "Featuring enhanced MP3 and Linear PCM recording." Is this going to work?
I love 19th century novels (British, American, and Russian) and children's fiction. I have always loved reading aloud. Also I'm a trained actress with a lot of experience and would love to put that to use.
Newbie tech question
Hello Deborah,
Welcome to LibriVox!
Good to have you with us. 
When selecting the tools for your volunteering, please take into consideration that it is unusual for a human being to read text ready for publishing (without unnecessary pauses, errors, missed or substituted words, etc) for much longer than a couple minutes. That usually means that (a) you will need to edit your recordings before you upload them and (b) if mistakes are identified in the uploaded files by proof-listeners, you will need to make changes to your recordings afterwards. Portable recorders are not good at editing, alas.
Even if you are (and I hope it is so) highly talented and all your recordings are going to be perfect, you will still need to get them off your device and on to another device that would let you upload them to LV. That is why most of us, as far as I know, use computers of some kind to edit, upload, fix files later, re-upload. Back and forth with a portable device is tedious, methinks.
To sum up, yes, it might work, and it is up to you to make it work. We will help as much as we can, but you are the producer.
Start by recording the 1-minute test. It's not an audition; it's an exercise to establish your ability to get the technical stuff correctly - the volume, the sample rate, the bitrate of the final MP3, file naming.
Please ask more questions as they come up. We have another forum for that: "Need Help? Got Advice?". We are happy to help.
I hope others with portable devices for recording will also chime in (I've heard that some LV volunteers use them).
Welcome to LibriVox!
Good to have you with us. When selecting the tools for your volunteering, please take into consideration that it is unusual for a human being to read text ready for publishing (without unnecessary pauses, errors, missed or substituted words, etc) for much longer than a couple minutes. That usually means that (a) you will need to edit your recordings before you upload them and (b) if mistakes are identified in the uploaded files by proof-listeners, you will need to make changes to your recordings afterwards. Portable recorders are not good at editing, alas.
Even if you are (and I hope it is so) highly talented and all your recordings are going to be perfect, you will still need to get them off your device and on to another device that would let you upload them to LV. That is why most of us, as far as I know, use computers of some kind to edit, upload, fix files later, re-upload. Back and forth with a portable device is tedious, methinks.
To sum up, yes, it might work, and it is up to you to make it work. We will help as much as we can, but you are the producer.
Start by recording the 1-minute test. It's not an audition; it's an exercise to establish your ability to get the technical stuff correctly - the volume, the sample rate, the bitrate of the final MP3, file naming.
Please ask more questions as they come up. We have another forum for that: "Need Help? Got Advice?". We are happy to help.
I hope others with portable devices for recording will also chime in (I've heard that some LV volunteers use them).
tovarisch
- reality prompts me to scale down my reading, sorry to say
to PLers: do correct my pronunciation please