hello, newbie recording audiobook

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timhall11

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hello, i love your site!

i am a newbie but i am in the midst of a recording issue and need help.

here it is: i spent the last over a year recording my reading of my 1700-page, 4-book novel, on substack. it is finished and, together with its text version, it is up on substack and anyone who wants to see it can enter the quartet's title, john brown's children, and read it for free at your leisure.

but i did not come here to advertise. i came because i just now learned that none of the recordings i made there, which reside in substack and also in a storage folder of my own email program, can be exported to audacity, which i had planned to use to ready the audio for production as an audiobook. the chatbot just informed me of this situation, but i had not seen any mention of this elsewhere before now. it is telling me that i have to do the recording all over.

my question to you, to this site, is: is this true? or is there a way to extract those audio files from substack's clutches and edit them in audacity or another editing program? after all, this work too me 13 months, and at age 83, this was work not to b cast aside easily.

please give me some feedback.

and my love to all your work,

tim hall
 
not sure what substack is, but could you play it back in substack and record the audio into a DAW like Audacity? rather than export the files. would take a while but faster than re recording.
 
If they are in a folder in your email that you can access, what format are they in?? Could be .mp3, .wav or some other type. If you can tell us we can advise. 1700 pages of audio is going to be EXTREMELY large - I don't think we are aware of substack, whatever it is. Almost certainly if you can download your files - we can fix it.
 
I gave a quick look to Substack, and while I see the text from your books, I don't see any way to access an audio version. If you could provide a direct link to the audio portion, perhaps then we can figure this out. At the very worst, Elly's suggestion of doing an audio capture is possible. You certainly won't need to recite the entire book again.

How did you create the audio in the first place? Did you upload them as voiceover, or did you recite it directly into Substack? From the little I have read, Substack supported audio formats are: mp3, mp4, aac, aiff, x-aiff, amr, flac, ogg, wav, and x-wav. Audacity will play most of different formats. You may need to add the ffmpeg library to read some of them.
 
timhall11 said:
hello, i love your site!

i am a newbie but i am in the midst of a recording issue and need hel


my question to you, to this site, is: is this true? or is there a way to extract those audio files from substack's clutches and edit them in audacity or another editing program? after all, this work too me 13 months, and at age 83, this was work not to b cast aside easily.
Click to expand...
You can use a third party app to download video and audio off of Substack - Substack Video & Audio Downloader
 
A 3rd party app isn't needed. I found the audio portions, and they download as MP3s.

Here are the first two. They appear to be short segments, each is only a few minutes long. Are these chapters?
 

Attachments

elly-d said:
not sure what substack is, but could you play it back in substack and record the audio into a DAW like Audacity? rather than export the files. would take a while but faster than re recording.
Click to expand...
it does look like i will have to do this. not sure how to do that without losing a lot of quality in the sound. just now substack admitted tome, via their chatbot, that they build their functionality to deny us taking our recording anywhere else. i argued that they re robbing me of my labor's creation -- not the text, which they admit is mine, but the performance, which i spent 13 months doing, 40 pages a week. they openly admit that they take the recordings.
but anyway, how to do what you say?
 
rob aylestone said:
If they are in a folder in your email that you can access, what format are they in?? Could be .mp3, .wav or some other type. If you can tell us we can advise. 1700 pages of audio is going to be EXTREMELY large - I don't think we are aware of substack, whatever it is. Almost certainly if you can download your files - we can fix it.
Click to expand...
substack has become a MAJOR web site for experienced and beginning writers to expose their material to the public. major writers try things out there, along with countless little guys like me. yes, 1700 pages is quite large. i posted 40 pages a week on the average, separately as text alone and as audio alone, making the recordings myself. it took me 13 months. right now i am only trying to gather the 40-page sections of the first book of the quartet, one that reaches 500 pages, put them into audacity and edit them for errors, noise, etc., i am starting to learn that process.
 
timhall11 said:
substack has become a MAJOR web site for experienced and beginning writers to expose their material to the public. major writers try things out there, along with countless little guys like me. yes, 1700 pages is quite large. i posted 40 pages a week on the average, separately as text alone and as audio alone, making the recordings myself. it took me 13 months. right now i am only trying to gather the 40-page sections of the first book of the quartet, one that reaches 500 pages, put them into audacity and edit them for errors, noise, etc., i am starting to learn that process.
Click to expand...
the individual sections, about 40 pages of text in audio version, go out every week by email (as does the text of the same) to free and paid subscribers, of which i have both. the audio sections arrive every week, and i simply thought i could gather them all up (from this first book) and put them in order in audacity and begin to work on editing. but just today, after finishing all the recording, i found i could not export them to audacity, being told that is not within their "functionality." i am told that we are not each sent a file with the recording in it but instead, once we have received the email, when we click on an imitation of a recording we hear the recording being played for us at substack headquarters from the recording they have there, so we never actually possess the recording. does this make any sense? they did not warn me of this when i started 13 months ago. in fact, i did ask and was not told i could not do it. i was told i would have to work outside of substack, which i naturally assumed meant that i could take my files and go to audacity. just today i found out that i apparently do not possess such files.
 
TalismanRich said:
I gave a quick look to Substack, and while I see the text from your books, I don't see any way to access an audio version. If you could provide a direct link to the audio portion, perhaps then we can figure this out. At the very worst, Elly's suggestion of doing an audio capture is possible. You certainly won't need to recite the entire book again.

How did you create the audio in the first place? Did you upload them as voiceover, or did you recite it directly into Substack? From the little I have read, Substack supported audio formats are: mp3, mp4, aac, aiff, x-aiff, amr, flac, ogg, wav, and x-wav. Audacity will play most of different formats. You may need to add the ffmpeg library to read some of them.
Click to expand...
i recited them directly into substack. the early very short ones probably were messages by me to my subscribers, and there were problems in the beginning with length of sections. they kept telling me that the 40-page sections would not go through g-mail messages, and therefore could not be posted, but i repeatedly tested them and they did go and i ended using up that length roughly for the entire 13 months.
 
yes i saw that they said they supported those formats, and at first that made me think i woudl have no problem taking my recordings to audacity.

but now i wonder. they may have only meant that they would accept those formats of any material that i was introducing into their format, since they ask you when you go to create an audio recording to select a file to upload or to choose to record yourself. that may not mean that the material will end up in one of those forms. at least the chatbot today would not budge on this output and consistently denied me the the ability to export any recordings and told me that if i wanted to do that in the future i would have to record it first outside of substack, then introduce i into substack so it could then go out to my subscriber, and then i could also use the recording that i had already made to make my audiobook.
 
TalismanRich said:
Looking further down I see segments that are more like 50 minutes long. However they still download as MP3s. "Section 19" is a 36 MB mp3.

Click the See All button and the select the sections marked "audio". https://timhall.substack.com/archive?sort=new
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my eyes are giving out tonight. so u r saying that these are indeed mp3 files and i should be able to download them and use them? that would, of course, solve everything. i did so and it went to media player and began playing. r u saying that when i go to book one (this one is from the last book) and do this i can save these sections and import them into audacity and begin working on them? i raise below the fact that they told me that i and my subscribers do not receive the actual recording but only get a link nd then hear it played by substack in their computer. i know this i late so i do not expect a reply right away. AND I THANK YOU ALL FOR SPENDING TIME HELPING ME!!!!!!!! we will continue later.
 
TalismanRich said:
Here are the first two. They appear to be short segments, each is only a few minutes long. Are these chapters?
Click to expand...
Tim, I listened to the two segments posted here.
I heard clicking throughout them, and toward the end of the first what sounded like a radio on in the background.
As tough as it sounds, I would say invest in better recording kit, and re-record.
Check it, check it, check it!
Make the product perfect, before publishing it.
 
rob aylestone said:
If they are in a folder in your email that you can access, what format are they in?? Could be .mp3, .wav or some other type. If you can tell us we can advise. 1700 pages of audio is going to be EXTREMELY large - I don't think we are aware of substack, whatever it is. Almost certainly if you can download your files - we can fix it.
Click to expand...
i found one in my email storage folder but i can't find a file, just a list of places i can send it to via wifi or get a link to it that can also be sent to such places, so they can access the recording which remains in the hands of substack. (at least this is how i see it at the moment, but i am a newbie at this stuff. you may know better. i can send said email with the recording or recording link in it to any of you, if you wish. will talk later.
 
Slouching Raymond said:
Tim, I listened to the two segments posted here.
I heard clicking throughout them, and toward the end of the first what sounded like a radio on in the background.
As tough as it sounds, I would say invest in better recording kit, and re-record.
Check it, check it, check it!
Make the product perfect, before publishing it.
Click to expand...
i worried about that, thought i could correct it later.
 
If i have understood correctly, you can get the files, but one by one, so it will take a while. If you are wanting your product to be similar to the audio books people listen to, then there’s a fair bit of work to do, and almost certainly some re-recording of some bits. From past experience of a very short project like this, the critical bit is creating a naming system. The one I did was a short story, but in the end we had chapter, page, take, and a letter to indicate success. 2-23-4-G. Chapter 2 page 23 take 4 and G for G. As soon as we had a ‘G’ we moved on, and moved the other takes to a reject folder, just in case. We would then edit the G takes into a complete chapter, and move that to a different folder. Very often we would find mistakes missed later on, and need to re-record them. Because we recorded in batches we marked the floor with mic stand and chair position so the new recordings matched sound wise. I got involved because while reading, he found doing his own recordings very hard, and it created big gaps that took ages to edit out. With me starting stopping and spotting mistakes as they happened it was quicker but it took far, far longer than I expected, and I had not expected this. I guessed three days and quoted him based on that, and it took two weeks of six hours a day. Never again. He didn't get bored at all. For me, it was worse than waiting for paint to dry.

The good things is that your voice works and does not sound out of place. Your real loss I think is just time. Plus, you are listening to the story telling, and missing the other stuff. Odd gaps, noises, changes in your ‘tone’, the occasional missed plosive (poppy breath sound).

I guess you are now downloading like mad. Have you abandoned them as a distributor? Is it done? Or what?
 
Just a final note. The MP3 files I downloaded load perfectly into Audacity. I haven't had time to really listen on headphones for quality, or if there might be things that could be done to clean them up.

JBC Section19.webp


It's a bit of a shame that you didn't find us earlier. The better way to do this would obviously be to record the tracks at home directly to your computer, and not through Substack. But that's water under the bridge, the question now is how much reworking can be done.

At least you have access to all of the previous work. You just need to download the files themselves.
 
Not sure where we are with this but Tim, you did mention a "possible loss of quality" if you need to re-record the Substack audio?
I can tell you that Audacity can easily be configured to record the signal going through the internal sound card and is thus AS good quality as what you are hearing.

You also have my sympathy and best wishes! Cleaning up 50 45 sides of punk for daughter was trial enough for me! And that was 15 years ago (I am a mere 79).

Dave.
 
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