Cold Readings — you either love them or you hate them.

You have very little insight into the script. You don’t know how the scene is going to resolve, let alone the entire story. In a way, it can be scarier than improv because unlike improv there can be a wrong choice that you’ll need to go back a...

I have been avoiding writing about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning (ML) in audiobooks so far, but with the changes currently underway, not talking about it is no longer an option.

We’ve seen it happen in movies, so we have expected it to come to audiobooks for quite some time: de...

An unpleasant churning feeling — that is the feeling I am left with after spending time on social media recently. That feeling is getting worse, but I don’t think the social media content is getting any more challenging per se.

Maybe I have just reached my own personal level of maximum toxicity?

Often, I take a quiet hour or so out of my day, and walk a loop up and behind the campus or down to the Connecticut River and back home. And it can be amazing to do this in silence.

My body starts off arrhythmically stumbling out the door and dodging a few cars. but, relatively quickly a pattern s...

Things are definitely changing a bit faster than I expected. And, it is easiest to see these changes if I look as far outside my typical day-to-day tech usage as I can. Once I do, I find things like this Tom Scott video…

I am a bit older than Tom. And, I do remember everything that he mentions...

When most audiobook narrators are setting up a booth, one place they tend to get stuck is understanding how to find the optimum position for their microphone.

The common advice that leads to lots of poorly placed microphones.

The 2-Fist or Hang-10 approach is the most common thing that people w...

DEREK [not his real name]: Hi Steven! Got some time to answer a few questions about my new booth?

ME: Hey man, new booth?

DEREK: Yeah, used the Covid stimulus money to get one used off Craigslist. Gina [not her real name] helped me move it to my place.

ME: What kind of booth is it?

DEREK: A...

Ocenaudio (properly pronounced: Oh • sen Aud • io) is a wonderful, free audio program that is loved by voice actors everywhere. It has evolved quite a bit over time, so I thought it would be a good idea to go over everything that you’d need to know.

First Stop: Preferences…

The settings in...

ocenaudio is a wonderful, freeware, audio editor that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux!

It’s a very capable tool that is always adding new features. Today, we’re focusing on Punch Recording (or Punch & Roll).

☕ Cup of Coffee

A ridiculous amount of caffeine was consumed while researching.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.” — David Hannum (not P. T. Barnum)

Make no mistake, the confluence of advancements in recording technology and an increased demand for new media creation in many formats has indeed created a boom in the voiceover industry. Many of the new formats and technolog...

No fancy script. No hacks. Just simple, straight forward, Punch & Roll recording. For free on all Macs, Windows, and Linux computers.

OcenAudio comes through with a feature that I mentioned to them back when I interviewed them in May of 2014. Isn’t it great to find a developer that really liste...

Doing proper research before recording an audiobook can be crucial to the success of the project. If you’re like me, the research happens in fits and starts. Sometimes, making notes while reviewing the text, and sometimes having moments of insight only after allowing the text to sit for a while. Hav...

iZotope must be feeling the heat! RX has some solid competition in the audio repair space coming from the talented coders at Acon Digital. Acon having set the price of their Resoration Suite at $99, may have been responsible for iZotope’s recent promotion of a new version of RX on sale at $99 (r...

So, you’ve recorded, edited, proofed, and finally mastered your audio. It’s ready to head off to ACX or off to a publisher. Well… you THINK it’s ready… you HOPE it’s… You get the idea.

You know that you’ve put in oodles of work getting this audiobook done, but if only there were a way to dou...

Sometimes, the best audio engineering job, like the best haircut, it the one that passes unnoticed. The result seems so well-suited and natural that you’re not quite sure if anything has been done at all. In the case of a haircut, this is often the result of asking the hairdresser to simply “take a...