BubbleDragon wrote:I've finished #21, the Shepher'ds boy and the Wolf.
I wanted to post it here for criticism, since it is my very first. I feel I may have read a little fast. Also, I applied the "amplify THEN noise reduction" technique. I have the original saved, so if someone really likes, I can upload that for comparison. It's also quiet! I know you folks stress that, but I've upped EVERY mic setting I found to max, and this is all I get. Should I just err... speak up? (edit: I've found the 'mic boost' feature in the windows settings. This helps a lot, but I'm going to have to be very careful with noise editing! I'll rerecord and work on it!) I'm pretty pleased, though, overall.
Whatever you did, it worked quite well, BubbleDragon. It's a nice clear, well-paced reading and I'm happy to use it as it stands. No further editing needs to be done. Thanks, and I hope to hear your voice on many more things here at LibriVox!
On the subject of "speaking up"...
a) It's generally speaking a good idea, BUT
b) It's really important that you simply use your natural voice.
Unless you've got experience at public speaking and are familiar with diaphragmatic control and breathing, you can literally "shout yourself hoarse" in doing that for an extended period. That Fable took you just over a minute to perform, and it's easy to sustain a loud voice for that length of time. But most things we read here take 20-30 minutes at a stretch and an hour and a half is not unheard of. You WILL hurt yourself trying to keep up an unnaturally loud voice for that period of time if you're not used to it.
So just keep on doing what you did with the last one when you read The Fox and The Goat. The rest will come naturally as you get more experience. Incidentally, you might consider reading the Kipling piece which is this week's Weekly Poetry selection. It's a bit longer than the Fables, but still pretty short.
Just as a rule of thumb, copy the text into a text file on your own machine, save it, and look to see how large it is in kilobites. Generally speaking, it takes 5 minutes to read 4k of text.
Oh, one other thing: how would you like to be credited on the catalog page? I'll need your name as you'd like it displayed, and a link to your URL (if any). For instance, I like to be credited this way:
Chip
http://ChipDoc.com/
Your default credit would be your username (BubbleDragon) with no link. Let us know!
