Professional recording v recording for LV

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 18th, 2014, 2:10 am

It is a bit scary. And I will never again read the reviews once they finally get to Audible/Amazon/iTunes. Never ever. (Did once

- that was the "nails on a chalkboard" line!)

Yes, they use 192kbps bit rate, which is fine as long as you remember to change it back to 128kbps in MP3 Options when you are exporting a LibriVox recording

. I bet I shall forget some time.

Ruth

sjmarky · Post by **sjmarky** » August 18th, 2014, 8:38 am

RuthieG wrote:It is a bit scary. And I will never again read the reviews once they finally get to Audible/Amazon/iTunes. Never ever. (Did once - that was the "nails on a chalkboard" line!)

Yes, they use 192kbps bit rate, which is fine as long as you remember to change it back to 128kbps in MP3 Options when you are exporting a LibriVox recording . I bet I shall forget some time.

Ruth

I never read my listener reviews on Audible either for the same reason. For a hoot, check out the Audiobook Industry Professionals group at LinkedIn. Sean Pratt (who records as "Lloyd James" and has over 600 credits, including most of Heinlein) posted "My new favorite s****y listener review on Audible.com", in which a listener trashes his recording of Ben Hur. Grover Gardner, an AudioFile "Golden Voice" chips in his own nasty listener review. It happens to everybody.

ACX requires 192kb because they do additional processing at their end and want to minimize the signal loss. And, yes, I've screwed it up switching back-and-forth myself. It's better to screw up the LV version; it's easy to replace. Audible does a QC check before accepting the files and will reject the whole thing if they find a 128. I once had an entire book rejected because I accidentally said the wrong chapter number on one chapter. Held it up for months.

AdeledePignerolles · December 16th, 2014, 7:32 pm

How do you get started? I can't find anything on their website about how to audition.

sjmarky · Post by **sjmarky** » December 16th, 2014, 7:51 pm

AdeledePignerolles wrote:How do you get started? I can't find anything on their website about how to audition.

If you mean ACX, you need to sign up as a producer first. Then you can search their listing of available titles to find ones to audition for. Currently ACX only works with North American and UK-based producers (it's a tax thing).

For others, do a Google search for audiobook producers, then go to their web sites to find out if they are accepting auditions, and if so, their submission process.

Be prepared: The competition is brutal. ACX now has over 20,000 registered narrators, and they list about 5,000 titles open for audition.

AdeledePignerolles · Post by **AdeledePignerolles** » July 14th, 2015, 8:03 pm

So...I signed up, read a few books, and thought everything was going great...then I signed up for three books that said they were each 20,000 words. Apart from having to figure out how to pronounce all the Chinese names (I should have thought about that first) everything was going great until I discovered that the first two have 60,000 to 70,000 words, which is not what they said. Also, I haven't been sent the script for the third one and it's been over a month. Does anyone have any experience with that or any ideas what to do? I'm not looking forward to recording 8 hour books when I thought they would be 2 hours.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

sjmarky · Post by **sjmarky** » July 14th, 2015, 10:17 pm

Welcome to the world of ACX. There's a Facebook group ACX Narrators and Producers that deals with all issues ACX. Post it there; you'll get help.

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » July 15th, 2015, 6:19 am

The Book Posting Agreement on Audible wrote:Provision of Word Count

You will provide the word count for the Book in the Title Profile. If the word count you provide underestimates or overestimates the actual length of the Book by 20% or more, the Producer you engage to produce the Audiobook may terminate the Producer’s ACX Audiobook Production Agreement with you based on your inaccurate word count in accordance with the terms of your ACX Audiobook Production Agreement with the Producer.

ACX support are very helpful in my experience. Try emailing them

.

Ruth

AdeledePignerolles · Post by **AdeledePignerolles** » July 15th, 2015, 6:36 am

OK, thanks! I didn't see that about the word count.

Breeze · Post by **Breeze** » July 24th, 2015, 3:30 pm

Congratulations on doing that Adele. I'm acquainted with a number of indie authors and am considering approaching one when I've finished my solo project and seeing if she'as interested. Her books are the kind of thing I love reading. I'm afraid I'll have laughter problems though.