Record Your Own Audio Book

Books on tape have been around a long time, when I was younger we would sometimes get an audio book to listen to in the car on a long trip. Now that people carry mp3 players almost everywhere there is no reason to wait for a road trip to listen to a good book. And, like ebooks, there isn't the pressure to sell huge volumes that is inherent when publishing a printed book, so it is much easier to get into. In fact with just some audio recording software and a high quality microphone you can get started recording your first audio book.

Once you have decided to record an audio book you can start getting prepared. You want to be very familiar with the text. Read first and record second. You can do some editing of the audio after recording, but you want to keep that to a minimum and keep a flow to the prose. Being familiar with the text will help you keep a steady pace. Keep your pace in check, you don't want to zip through it fast so that the listener can really appreciate and hear everything you are reading. In addition to keeping that slow pace, be sure to add pauses after sentences and paragraphs, and beware being monotone. Try to breathe some life into your reading, no one will want to listen to you drone on in a flat voice. Another suggestion would be to consider printing out a hard copy of the book. Unbound, single-sided pages will make page turning easy.

Once you are prepared you just need to schedule yourself a chunk of quiet time to sit down and start recording. You can estimate the total amount of time you will need by timing how long it takes you to read through a single page and multiply by the number of pages. For a longer book you might want to break it out into more than one sitting. A good choice for audio recording is WavePad Sound Editor. By recording directly into an audio editor like WavePad you can easily go in to the recorded audio file when you are done recording to cut out any places you might have stumbled or make any other adjustment that might be needed like amplifying or equalizing the audio file or eliminating any background noise that might have crept in. And if you recorded in more than one session you can merge the files together before publishing your final mp3 file and sharing it with the world.

Record Video from Anywhere

Debut Video Capture Software records and captures video from webcams, recording devices, and from your computer screen. It’s great for recording tutorials you can post to online sites such as YouTube, for making company messages, for recording streaming video, and more. See for yourself how easy it is to get started capturing and recording videos in this Debut video tutorial:

Axon Windows PBX Tutorial

Putting together a phone system can be a daunting task. When you need to figure out phone lines and extensions, plus extras like on-hold music, things can quickly spiral out of control, especially if aren't well versed in Linux—which many PBX systems require. Fortunately, there is another option. With Axon, a Windows PBX system, as with all of our telephony software, we have done our best to keep everything simple and straight forward. Plus we have just finished a new quick start video tutorial to further guide you through the process of setting up your new PBX telephone system.

So if you are looking for a way to manage telephone calls and extensions across your business, and you don't have an IT team to do the grunt work for you, take a look at Axon virtual Windows-based PBX software. It will make getting your phones up and running as painless as possible, and you don't even need to learn a new operating system.

Music Editing for Language Lessons

We recently found a series of videos made by a WavePad user as a guide for people just getting started with audio editing, and for using sound editing software to support use of music in language lessons. While many of the basics are covered in our WavePad video tutorials as well, if there is one thing I have learned, it is that sometimes hearing the same thing in a slightly different way can really help you pick it up. If you are looking for another source to help you ease into audio editing, you should check out this series of 7 videos covering some WavePad audio editing basics:

1. Select and cut
   
2. Splitting and trimming
   
3. Saving files in different sound formats
   
4. Changing audio track speed
   
5. Changing audio track pitch
   
6. Using slower speeds and looping to teach sections of a song
   
7. Copying edited clips to a new file
   

So whether you are teaching or learning songs in another language, or you have any other audio projects, be sure that you have WavePad Audio Editor on hand. You never know when it might come in handy.

Video Tutorial: Simple Slideshow Software in Action

See how easy it is to bring your digital photos to life and share your favorite memories with family and friends with PhotoStage slideshow creation software. Our recently finished PhotoStage video tutorial walks you through the process so you can see how easy it is to combine images, video clips, music and narration into a truly memorable slideshow movie.

Download PhotoStage slideshow software today to start making your own custom multimedia presentation to share with friends and family and preserve your memories.

Become a DJ: Learning the Software is Half the Battle

Zulu Virtual DJ Software is an easy-to-use dj software program for mixing track after track during live performances, or you can simply let Zulu be the DJ for you.

To make getting started even easier, we put together this introduction to Zulu DJ Software video tutorial to help aspiring DJs learn their way around the Zulu interface. The video covers the music list, auto play, using the deck, setting the beats per minute (BPM) and using auto-sync, the pitch slider and speed controls for smooth transitions between tracks. It also covers setting cue points, looping, applying effects, and using the headphone output.

Once you've learned some of the basics covered in this video, then all that's really left is picking out the songs to play and keep things moving at your next party.

Add Text to Videos

Every now and then, you might find the ocassion to add text to your video. There are only certain times you'll want to add text—afterall, a video should speak for itself—but text can appear as titles, subtitles, captions, overlays, as credits, or a watermark on your video. Adding text is easy to do, you just need a user-friendly video editor like VideoPad Video Editing Software.

Part One: captions, title screens and credits

Text can be added to your videos as captions to describe scenes or to provide commentary to the current action. You can also insert a title screen at the beginning of your movie, and credits at the end.

To add a caption or overlay text to any clip, first select the clip in the sequence, then click the green plus button on the Overlay Track. Make sure the Text option is selected, then type the text for the clip in the text field and click Add when you are done. The text will be added at the 'In Point' position, and you'll see a 3-second-long box added to the Overlay Track on the sequence. You can move this box anywhere in the movie along the overlay track, and you can change its duration by dragging out the left and right edges of the box. Select the text overlay to view it in the Clip Preview panel, where you can change the size, opacity, font, color, and more, as shown below.


Creating a title screen is very similar, but first you have to add a blank clip to the movie. Click the 'Insert Blank' icon in the toolbar and choose to add the clip to the beginning of the movie. Next, add a new overlay by clicking the green plus sign on the Overlay Track and type the title into the text field. Select the overlay on the sequence to view it in the Clip Preview panel, where you can position the text in the middle of the screen using the Alignment buttons, and adjust the size using the Size Slider.

To add text credits at the end, add another blank clip to the end of your movie. Create a new Text overlay by clicking the plus sign on the Overlay Track. Then type the credits into the text box, placing each name on its own line, and click OK when you are done. Select the text overlay on the sequence to make it appear in the Clip Preview panel. From the panel, select Bottom to Top from the Scroll drop menu. Preview the credits. If they go by too quickly, increase the duration of the text overlay. If they stop in the middle, you need to increase the duration of the blank clip so the credits have enough time to scroll off the page.

For visual demonstrations of all the text-tips discussed in this blog, you can view the video tutorial VideoPad Video Editor Tutorial - Part 2 and watch the beginning sections on working with text. Part two will talk about working with subtitles in VideoPad.