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How To Record And Publish Web Audio

Many people have complimented me about the audio interviews and on my web site, http://www.hardtofindseminars.com . I’ve also had many people inquire as to how I record these audios and put them online.

In this short audio, I explain exactly how I create the audio files for my web site:

It’s no secret to having great audios on your web site that play with the click of a button – and it’s not difficult either!

This is Michael Senoff with HardtoFindSeminars.com. Here’s a short recording on exactly how I currently record my audio recordings. I talk about the equipment I use, the advantages of the software I use. I give you all the websites to get everything and the stores to get the same stuff that I use, and I offer advice and some information on how and what I’m thinking about when I’m doing audio recordings and editing. I hope this is helpful. Enjoy!

Michael: There’s a lot of expensive gadgets online. I just use a simple digital recorder. You can go to Radio Shack. A lot of these recorders have software that comes with them, and the one I use, it’s called a Sony ICD-ST25 Stereo. You can find it on eBay as well.

It’s just a little handheld digital recorder. It comes with some great software, and that’s going to record your calls, but you need a little gadget from Radio Shack and if you go online and go to RadioShack.com , or go to a local one and tell them you want to record your calls, they have several different things that you hook into your phone line that basically bypasses the phone and there’s a plug that will plug right into your digital recorder.

When you make your calls, you just press the record button on your recorder and you’re recording both sides of the conversation digitally, and it’s really to use. It just takes a little bit of time to get it set up and make sure your wires are all connected properly, but it works fine.

You’re plugging right into the recorder, and the recorder is in between the line and your phone. It costs maybe $125 to get set up.

If you want a lot better quality, there are better things out there. If you go online, just search the Internet Audio Guy. You’ll find him. His name is Mike Stewart. This guy was a sound engineer from Atlanta, Georgia, and he really understands the equipment out there. He’s in the Internet Marketing circles, but he’s got some good equipment as well.

Once you do a recording, you’ll save the recording from your digital IC recorder onto your hard drive as a .wav file, and then once I have the wav file, all do the necessary editing of the file. So, it’s just like a Word document. It’s not hard.

You’ll need a couple of other components which just take a little bit to get the hang of, but once you have the file on your computer, you’ve got it safe there. You want to get it off the digital recorder so you’ve got it backed up.

Then, there’s the editing software. You can do your editing with it. The thing I use is the only thing I ever learned how to do. It’s called Goldwave. If you go to Goldwave.com , you can download a free version and it will let you play around with a real short file.

I’ll give you some advice. There’s two versions. They have a 5.something version, and then they have a 4.something version. The 4.something version is the one I still use because that’s what I learned how to do editing on, and I’ve tried their 5. version, and they’ve really changed a lot, and editing goes a lot slower when you’re doing a lot of editing.

So, I’m really used to this 4. version. I would recommend you use that and you can download that and play around with it.

So, you’ll open up the audio file. It looks like a bunch of squiggly lines. It’s no different than a Word document. You highlight what you want to get rid of, and you delete it. It’s really easy once you get the hang of it.

Then, after you do your editing, I have a webmaster who does my green buttons because I have such a large amount of recordings, I host all the recordings on my server. But, I would recommend you use InstantAudio.com . It’s all integrated. It’s an online service, and actually a lot of my recordings I do use InstantAudio.com .

So, what happens – let’s say you take the recording off your digital recorder and you do your editing or let’s say it’s perfect as it is, and it’s in a wav file. With your Goldwave software, you’re going to want to convert that wav file into an mp3 file.

Now, the reason I say do the editing in a wav file is because when you’re doing your editing, it goes a lot faster because when you take little chunks out of the audio recording and then you save it, with an mp3 file it takes along time to save. If you do editing like I’m doing, you’re going to be saving a lot because you always want to back up your work in case the computer freezes up or whatever.

So, you want to do all your editing in wav. Then, once you’re finished editing, you’ll save it as an mp3 file. You’ll save as, just like you’d save any file. It will say, “Save As – Type” So what type of file do you want to save it as.

You save it as an mp3, and then it gives you a choice of what rate to save it as. You want to save it as 22,050 hertz, which stands for megahertz. You want to save it as a mono so it’s not so huge. If you save it as stereo, the file size is going to be twice as large and it’s going to take a long time. You don’t need it in stereo. This will be fine for the quality, and you want to save it as 24 kbps. I think it stands for kilobytes per second.

These numbers will work perfectly. Actually, they’re the only numbers that will work with Instant Audio. So, let’s say you save it under these criteria that I just explained.

Now, you subscribe for $29 a month to InstantAudio.com . You log into your InstantAudio.com site, and you upload and encode your file.

So, you upload it into this server and it gives you a whole control panel, and it automatically converts into what’s called Flash, and that’s what you see on my site, those green buttons. Flash allows your visitors to your site to click on the button and it starts playing instantly rather when you click on an mp3, they’ve got to sit there and wait for it to download before you hear the first word.

So, it encodes and converts it. It gives you a choice of different players. You can get players that have fast forward and fast reverse, pause, stop. You can have players that are just one play button. And, it let’s you design all that, and you choose your button, and then it gives you some code and then, you’ll just paste the code to where you want the audio recording on your webpage, and you’re ready to go.

It is running off their server. So, if you have a bunch of these buttons on your webpage, the page load time is pretty slow. Their servers can definitely handle it. The only thing you want to watch out for is if you have too many of those recordings on one page, the load time of those buttons can be pretty slow. So, it’s just something to keep in mind, and you can play around with it. But, four or five or six or seven, even ten of them, if people know they’re going there for a recording, you can say, “Give it a couple of seconds for the page to load.” Just let them know that it’s going to take a minute to load. Just be aware of that.