But back to Tiny Vox – wow! what a cool app for only a couple of bucks. If you’re on a budget you can get good clean sound tracks with this little gem. The built in noise cancellation leaves the front and back end of your sound clips hiss free.

But I got really lucky that I ran into Tabitha Thompson from a class I taught. She was looking into the whole process of leveling up her illustration skills as she’s already a talented writer. I mentioned that I was looking for voice work and she said she would love to provide a sample – it was amazing – I only found out after the recordings that she was trained professionally. It pays to open your mouth.

Tabitha Thompson has an advanced-level degree in theater from Cambridge, England, and has worked as a professional actor, singer, and dancer since 1989. You can contact or email her at tabitha.voiceact at icloud dot com. (it’s in code to save her from SPAM) 

 

Then I worried that I wouldn’t be able to afford her – but her rates were really reasonable – so I paid for 3 hours of her time which included driving down from Salt Lake. Then I paid for an hour of time with a sound studio. Since I’m in app creation 2.0 I wanted to leave no stone un-turned. If that figure of speech works for that. My goal in making this app is to give reviewers, moms, dads, kids, peers, very little to find fault with.  I tried to give as little input as possible during the recording since I’m really just an illustrator. I told myself, “Let Tabitha feel free to explore her art as you enjoy being left alone to explore yours.” The result was really fun. Being the professional she is -she nailed it on the second take. I only asked her to re-read a few lines twice and as she wouldn’t have understood without seeing the illustrations.

I used a professional sound guy as I wanted the best quality.

The sound guy (Ryan Haldeman part of the “kid history – youtube” team and part of the FolioAcademy team)  used wetransfer.com (my favorite large file sharing site) to send me the voice recordings. Then I used Audacity to cut the long sound files into page segments. We all thought it would make a better product to have Tabitha read the entire manuscript – rather than break each page for my convenience. I think it gave her a much better flow and rhythm…and it’s super easy to cut the file on your PC or Mac.

Audacity is a free program you can download and you can learn what you need in about 20 min by watching various youtube videos. Want to learn how to cut a file? Just ask youtube: “how to cut file audacity” then watch a 5 year old lay it out – could you have predicted this 20 years ago? Ha! Oh – one little trick with Audacity. You’ll want to export your files in mp3 format (if you’re working with Kwik) – BUT Audacity can’t do that for you because of the pesky royalty Audacity would have to pay to let you do that – instead – try to export to mp3 from Audacity anyway – Audacity came up with a link when you try to save that takes you to a 3rd party web page where you can download a tiny program that works behind the scenes with Audacity to magically create mp3 files – in fact after you install that second program you can just export mp3s right from Audacity.

Stay tuned as I’ll keep sharing my progress on “Gary’s Place” which I plan to submit to Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. in a few weeks. I’ll continue to blog about this process even sharing my sales stats when it hits the various app stores! If you’re wondering where the first steps are I started this project a while back, in September 2013 I think. so just scroll down or click the following links and you can check out my other steps.

Now available, Step 7.

here are the links for step one, two, three, four, five and five.5