Poetry in Record Time

Photo courtesy of Lucky Louie at Wikimedia

With the awesomeness of the Internet, so many literary journals are able to add audio recordings of poems and stories to go along with the text of the author's work as well as those writerly head shots.

I've recently had two writer friends ask me how to record themselves reading their work in WAV format so that it might be added to a journal's web site, and honestly I wasn't sure how to answer them until today, when I had to figure it out for myself.

I thought I'd post my findings here, so that it might save you a little time and trouble. So here are the WAV recording dance steps. I have a Mac, so it may be slightly different for you if you don't. Also, keep in mind that I am a poet, and not in any way a techie:

1. Go to Softonic and download Audio Recorder 3.2. I was nervous about getting viruses and all that, but it didn't happen. I make no guarantees for you, however.

a. The Mac tosses downloads into the "Downloads" folder, which can be found in your finder-- in case that's new to you. Go there and click. It should be at the top of the list.

2. Open Audio Recorder 3.2 on your handy dandy computer.

3. When the itty bitty box pops up, click on "voice settings."

4. Click on "edit profiles" and a new box will pop up.

5. Click on "Format," and choose WAV. Close the box.

6. Click on "Record" and go to town with your authorly self. Make sure there are no kitties in the vicinity as they're always trying to upstage a reader.

7. Save the file in a place where you can find it easily. I saved it to my desktop until further un-neededness.

8. Smack your forehead and say, "Ha!"

9. I had to save mine to a disk. If this is the case for you, pop the blank disk into your cd rom drive, find the icon in your finder, and drag your WAV file into it. Mine had a little yellow and black waspy circle looking icon that I had to click before it would burn. Burn, baby, burn.

I hope that's helpful.