best technique for recording books

I want to start to record books for CD or mp3 and am wondering how the best way to do this? Do I record one chapter & then save the file and then the next chapter as another file or what is the best way to do this? Appreciate your help.

Books have been written about microphone technique, room acoustics, etc, so I’ll stick with file basics.

Depending on the length of the work, I would probably speak and Export each chapter as a WAV file and make a protection copy of it onto separate media. DO NOT use MP3 for production, effects, filtering and corrections and do not reuse filenames. It’s not unusual for me to post sound samples and pictures to illustrate a point and they all have filenames like “piano2.wav.” and “C304-2.wav” They were both second revisions of the work. The original capture recording still exists (piano.wav) on a backup hard drive.

If your chapters go on for pages and pages, you might consider finer divisions. 20120123Chapter-1a.wav

You can reverse the title and date as you see fit. Do Not put normal dates (1/23/12) in filenames. Use only upper and lower case letters, numbers, dash and underscore.

Do Not go into this with the idea that you are going to make crappy recordings and “filter you way to success” in Audacity. We can’t take out room echoes, metro-bus engines and the TV playing down the hall. Those will kill your recording. This point can’t be stressed enough. There are people in my company who make voice recordings who put quilts in a small closet and record in there to get away from room and neighborhood noises.

Here’s one I constructed for a movie voice recording.

http://www.kozco.com/pictures/boothFinished/laptop-mic.jpg

Those are furniture moving pads and the show consisted of several people acting from a script into the microphone.

Initial voice recording is harder than it looks.

Koz

Do Not save the work as AUP files. Export as WAV.

The fuzzy rule with number of capture files is pretty simple. Audacity just crashed. The computer went to a clean desktop and took all your current work with it. How much work did you just lose?

Give us an idea of the technology you were planning on using for the work. You posted in a forum where we can’t tell anything about you.

Koz