How To Record A Text With Audio Story

Of the many categories of stories Literotica writers can post their work to the audio story is probably the most difficult. While the writing of the story is not too difficult, the writer should remain aware that this will be a performance piece. If you are writing and recording a poem, the length normally will be short which should make the actual recording fairly easy. If you are writing prose you should keep in mind that any recording you make will take up a lot of disk space. That simple fifteen hundred word story can take up to twenty-five to thirty megabytes or more depending upon your recording quality.

I will discuss the writing and performing a bit more in later articles, for this article I want to discuss the actual mechanics of recording your Audio Story. First of all, this article is intended for people with little or no experience in submitting Audio Stories to Lit, so those of you with expensive audio equipment and software you might was to skip over this article. This is about recording your Audio Stories as inexpensively and easily as possible.

Again, for those of you new to recording stories, you don't need to go out and spend tens or hundreds of dollars to buy recording software or hardware. If you have a windows based system, you should already have what you need to record and submit a story. In your windows accessories folder you should find a program called Sound Recorder. My Sound Recorder program is in the entertainment folder within the accessories folder. This is all the software you will need to record your story.

Many computers have a built in microphone, but I recommend that you go and buy a cheap microphone, most should cost between ten and twenty dollars. You can use your built in microphone but I find an external microphone more convenient and I think it gives you a bit better control of what sound is picked up in the recording process. Anyway, once you have your microphone, simply plug it into the microphone port in your computer and you are ready to go.

Before you start recording you will want to consider making a few changes to the Sound Recorder's default settings. To do this you need to start the program, then go to the menu and click on File. Select properties and look down about the middle of the pop up box for a box titled Format Conversion. Leave the selection on Recording Formats and then click Convert Now. Another box will pop up called Sound Selection. Simply click on the down arrow to the right of the name: [untitled].

Once you click on this arrow you will see the options for three different sound qualities: CD Quality, Radio Quality and Phone Quality. CD Quality provides the best sound quality with very little static, clicks or pops, unfortunately this added quality comes at a cost, disc space. The size of your sound file for your story using CD Quality will be four or five times larger than one recorded at a Radio or Phone Quality level.

While those of you with huge hard drives may not worry much about the size of your files, keep in mind you will eventually sending this file to Literotica via your internet connection and the huge files will take a long time to transfer. Anyway, depending upon the quality you need for your recording simply click on the quality you want and hit the OK button. You will drop back to a box titled Properties for Sound where you will hit the OK button again and you will return to the Sound Recorder.

The recorder is ready to record up to sixty seconds of sound, so if your poem or story is short simply click on the red button and begin recording. If you think your story is longer than sixty seconds don't panic, you will just need to set the recorder to record a longer period. Simply push the red button and let it record anything for sixty seconds. It will stop after sixty seconds, but if you hit the red button again, suddenly it will extend the recording period by another sixty seconds.

If your story is very long, all you have to do is repeat the steps about until you have the length of recording you think you will need. Once you have enough time set on the recorder to record your story, simply rewind (push the double arrows pointing to the left) and then push the red button and record your story. When you finish the story, hit the stop button (the rectangular button to the left of the red button). If there is a lot of excess time left on the recording you can cut off this excess at the end by going to the menu and clicking on Edit. When the drop down menu appears simply click on Delete After Current Position and your recording will be ready to save.

Saving the recorded story is like saving any other file, simple go to the menu, click on File, select Save As, navigate to whatever folder you want to save your file into, type in a file name and hit Save. You now have a file ready to play back and/or submit to Literotica. You might want to look at the file detail to see exactly how big a file you have, it might surprise you how big it can get, especially if you recorded at CD quality.

If you plan to record a lot of long stories you might want to set up a template so you don't have to waste time running the recorder out sixty seconds at a time for each story you write. When setting up a template, you repeat the steps above until you have a blank recording about five minutes long. Save this blank file titling it Template 5 min, or something like that. When you want to record a story, open the file, make sure it is rewound and then hit the red button to record. You can then edit the recording to remove any unrecorded space and the give the file another name (this is important so you can keep your template for future recordings) and save it.

The Sound Recorder is limited in what it can do when compared to the other software available, but it is an inexpensive and relatively easy program to record your stories. Limited as it is, sound recorder does have some ways to enhance your recording with special effects. I will discuss these in a future article.