Recording an audiobook: the gory details

September 1, 2007 5:58 AM

Recording a full-length book into downloadable audio format: what's the best way to do that?

Any advice or instruction on how to do it, links to resources and (preferably free) software would be appreciated. Thank you.

posted by JaySunSee to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Are you speaking the book in, or using a book-on-cd?
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:19 AM on September 1, 2007

Best answer: For the former, Librivox does this all the time, and have fairly extensive guides.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:21 AM on September 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Are you speaking the book in, or using a book-on-cd?

Speaking/reading the book and recording it into a downloadable audio format. I'm not sure the best way of doing it, or even how I should get started on such a monolithic task.
posted by JaySunSee at 6:31 AM on September 1, 2007

My first best answer. *tear*
posted by a robot made out of meat at 7:25 AM on September 1, 2007

Response by poster: And a well deserved one too.
posted by JaySunSee at 7:52 AM on September 1, 2007

Best answer: Basically you are looking at the same question as any other kind of audio recording on you computer. Lots of past stuff on this (those links software-oriented), explore other audio and recording type tags from those threads as well, there have been tons of audio recording threads on AskMe You should seriously consider breaking it down into parts, for ease of recording, ease of use, and so you don't have to dink around with patching and editing. The free-er software is, the harder you're going to find it to do any kind of complicated editing with it, as in cutting bad stuff out or splicing chunks together.
posted by nanojath at 12:29 PM on September 1, 2007

The easiest way to do it is likely turning the book into a text file, then using the export as speech setting on your text editor. Boom, mp3.
posted by klangklangston at 10:52 AM on September 2, 2007 [1 favorite]