Audio is now recorded (5GC)

I learnt something this weekend. Something about recording voice over for a game, though my latest creation does not have voice over in the regular game term, it is in fact me Reading the pages in the book turned app. Well to be precise it is Me areading all the pages, and also my daughter Leilani reading all the pages.

I already blogged about having better equipment and the differecne it made to the quality of the spoken audio, so i won't go back into that. However after I recordeed the better audio i managed to use an audio tool that my friend from work had recommended (Dan). He told me about an app that would allow me to refactor all my audio to approximately the same level. He even went so far as to try this out on some of my audio and tol me how good it was. Then he supplied a copy of the app from somewhere on the web.

The Levelator
The program/app that he used is called the Levelator. When I tried this Levelator out on some of my Old crappy audio I have tos ay that I was not so implressed, in fact I could not understand why my friedn Dan had been so excited about it. However Once I had better Audio I figured I should o due diligence and check the Levelator out again. And... OMGoodness... It was amazing. One of my longer pages that I read had my volume go up and down slightly during the page being read. I wasn't to bothered as I figured I could always adjust the volue (amplify) just the low sections etc. This program did it all for me. It also brought up all the audio to be at a normalized level across the whole piece. I was not only surprised, but very excited. This cut down my re-amplification work to Zero.

In the end I used this Levelator on all the audio I had re-recorded for me reading the book. Then I tried it on my Daughters readings, adn whammo, once again it did an excellent job. And on her audio recordings it had to work a bit harder as her volume was a bit more variable than my own.

What else did I learn?
I learn't that all recordings like this NEED a Director. When my daughter was left to record her own audio I found I would have problems with it. All direction related. Not happy enough here, not astounded enough there etc. Now what I have recorded from her isn't perfect, but when I directed she was AWEOMSE, when  I did not, the results were average.Quite a surprise, and the way she adjusted to my suggestions was amazing. So I learn't that recording voice over NEEDS a Director.

So now I hacve all the recorded Audio for the female and male readings done. It is a very exciting thing to hear all that disonnected audio playing out in order properly. Very exciting indeed. I now have 2 bugs to fix and test the application on an iPad, and then I can send it off to the artist for final approval before launching it onto the iDevices and Android devices.

Have a great Day,
Da Voodoochief