Before you start: Make sure you have a working microphone plugged in to your computer! 1. Click on the Voice Recorder button.
2. A small and simple sound recorder should have opened. You can now start recording.
However, the sound recorder will automatically save files as WAV files which can be quite large, making exporting and uploading longer and more tedious.
To change your recorder's settings, follow the instructions below. 1. Click on File > Properties in the Sound Recorder window.
2. In the middle panel, click the Convert Now… button.
3. This should have opened another window.
- Beside Format, change the option to “MPEG Layer-3”
- Beside Attributes, scroll down and change the option to “32 kBit/s, 16,000 Hz, Stereo 3kb/sec”
- Click OK.
4. The window should have closed. Click OK in the remaining window. All recordings should now be saved as mp3 files!
Recording a file: 1. Begin Recording
- Click the button with the red circle to start recording.
- Press the button with the black square to stop recording.
- To play back what you have recorded, press rewind (two arrows facing left) or drag the bar to the beginning and press play (one arrow facing right).
2. If you are unhappy with the recording, you can click on File > New and start again.
3. When you are happy with the recording, click on File > Save to save the sound recording.
- Chose where you would like to save the file
- Change the file name
- Click Save.
Here’re a few helpful tips to assist you in recording your voice and picture audio for Little Reader. 1.) Make sure you have the hardware: You need a working microphone for your computer.
If you have a headset with a microphone, this will do just fine.
2.) You need to open Sound Recorder in your PC. I'm assuming you're using a Windows-based computer,
and they all come with a Sound Recorder program (it's just that not a lot of people use it!)
- Click on START on your taskbar.
- Click on ALL PROGRAMS - ACCESSORIES - ENTERTAINMENT
- Lastly, click on Sound Recorder.
3.) This will open a very simple sound recorder on your computer. Make sure your microphone is plugged in already.
4.) Click on the RECORD button to begin recording.
TIP – Speak immediately after pressing “Record,” so you won’t leave so much space in the beginning.
That's it! You can now record all the words, phrases and yes - even stories - that you want!
FOR ADVANCED USERS: Looking for a free program with better functionalities compared to the basic one that came with your Windows?
You can try downloading and using
Audacity – a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds.
For those of you who are more tech-savvy, you can use this application to manually edit your sound files, using different encoders and noise removal functions.
Here are some of Audacity's features that you might find useful: • Recording and playing sounds
• Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo) so you can trim your recordings and remove unwanted noise and “dead air”
• Adjusting the amplitude (loudness) of your recordings
• Noise removal (but mind you, don’t expect miracles!
)
• Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample
• Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (including GNU/Linux and BSD) amongst others.
Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio. If you are interested in using this software and would like to get some more help on using it, let us know, and we can provide you more basic information on how to use the program.
Enjoy!