The Plan

A few years ago, my son Tom met Catherine Hamlin, a most remarkable Australian doctor working in Addis Ababa. He gave me a copy of her biography Hospital by the River, and I was deeply moved both by her work and the terrible suffering of the women she served.

I’d been writing Quid and Harmony for some time, and decided to complete the novel and dedicate all the proceeds to furthering her work... [read more]

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Making a podcast

I've had great fun the last few weeks trying to make a half-decent podcast of Quid and Harmony. Finding a place in the house that was quiet enough was the first challenge. Even building a cubby out of mattresses was less than effective, though it did bring back all sorts of childhood memories.

Anyway, a great bit of software called Audacity has a noise-reduction feature, and that solved most of the problem. It removes most background at the cost of a bit of distortion. Well worth doing.

Sound files are pretty big. QandH is about 12 hours of reading, and the raw wav files came to nearly 11 Gig. My poor hard-drive nearly died from shock.

Anyway, the edited mp3 equivalent came to about 600MB and is quite good quality, even if I say so myself.

A bit more tinkering, and she'll be ready to roll. I'll put a sample on my website. Soon, if the wind blows true, you'll be able to download the whole thing from podiobooks.com. Or you'll be able to buy the CD from me.

2 comments:

Steve Isham said...

Bravo Allan! I'm ready to listen.

Unknown said...

I also expect this and I am expecting your website.thanks for sharing..
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