This is where I read to you

So, a while ago, some of my friends and fellow cast members of the @sansukhpodfic​ asked about how to make and edit podfic on their own. I created this tutorial for them, as a supplement to the resources already posted  by the Sansukh mods. In the wake of the most recent @auralphonic​ episode asking for technical advice on podficcing in Audacity, I thought I would polish this up and post it. This tutorial explains how, once you have permission to record a story, you go about turning it into a podfic using Audacity. It focuses on technical and logistical details, rather than artistic advice, and is cobbled together from my own experience, my knowledge of the mathematics behind signal analysis, and other people’s tutorials. There’s lots of communities and resources out there that give advice on the artistic side (Auralphonic, for example, has an episode for newbies), which I recommend checking out.

Disclaimer: There is no one standard method of doing this! This is the method I have found gives me the best results, personally, but there may be better ways to do this. I strongly recommend checking out other resources for comparison.

Voiceteam Mystery Box is a two-week mini spinoff of Voiceteam to wrap up the holiday season and start the new year! Every day of the first week, teams will be presented with two new point-earning challenges. Each challenge will be active for seven days, so for the second week two challenges will close each day. Once all the challenges have closed, the team with the most points per member wins!

TIMELINE

Sign-ups: December 12th–December 22nd

Discord server opens: December 23rd

Challenges post: December 26th-January 1st

Final challenge ends: January 8th

Amnesty: January 9th

Results & Celebration: January 10th

Voiceteam runs on GMT, which means that all challenge drops and deadlines will happen at midnight GMT. Your mods—cantarina, forzandopod, klb, and wingedwords—are in EST, CST and PST.

RULES

For Mystery Box, we’ll be offering team sign-ups and individual sign-ups. In team sign-ups, teams of between 5 and 15 players can sign up as a complete group. In individual sign-ups, individual players can sign up to be matched by mods with others who signed up individually.

Minors (and over-18 folk who prefer to avoid mature content) are welcome to participate in Voiceteam! Where needed, two Discord channels will be provided to a group: a general-access channel and a NSFW channel.

Since team sizes will vary, each team’s final score will be determined by dividing the number of points the team earned by the number of players.

Challenges will sometimes leave room for interpretation. If you are not sure whether something counts, please check with the mods. We support creativity and will be generous with what we allow!

Completed creations should be turned in to the mods via a form we will link here once the challenge begins. A mod will look over and verify your submission and will reach out to you if we disagree about the point value or need more information from you. You are also encouraged (but not required) to share your creations within the Discord so that other players can see and enjoy them!

Individual participants will have a cap for how many points they can earn for each day’s challenges. If you’ve capped out for a particular day’s challenges, you can still participate by supporting and cheering for your other team members!

This challenge is all about adding fun and connection to our lives, not adding stress! If you choose to sit out a couple days or to only take on a single challenge for the whole event, that’s perfectly allowed. If you decide to just hang out in chat from time to time and cheer on your team, and you end up not making any creations, that’s allowed too. That said, you do need to meet the minimum participation level of checking in with your team to say hi once per week, or you will be removed from the team. If you are removed for non-participation, there is no stigma attached (really really) and you’re still welcome to sign up for future rounds.

Each team member has the final decision about their own creations (including their part in collaborative creations, if they choose to participate in any). There are no minimum requirements for the quality or size of your creations.

The mods are committed to supporting a positive experience for our players! Please feel free to come to the mods to request support with any issues, including but not limited to: feelings of exclusion, conflict with a group member, and concerns about the rules or structure of Voiceteam. We’ll keep your concerns confidential unless you give us the go-ahead to share them, but we can help you think up solutions or make mod-level changes as needed to address the problem. For more serious problems, our anti-harassment policy is linked here.

This is a community space, and players are expected to act in ways that take the needs and feelings of other players into account. If a player publicly complains about their team, pressures or excludes team members, or gives unsolicited concrit, they will be contacted by the mods and asked to stop. If this type of behavior happens repeatedly, they may be asked to leave Voiceteam or asked not to return in future years.

That said, our community will always make space for calling out or calling in of racism, transphobia, or other behavior harmful to historically marginalized communities, and the mods will always work to support players who speak up about this type of behavior. This includes calling out/calling in of the mods.

Connected to the previous point, we want to publicly (re-)acknowledge that as an all-white mod team we’re also a part of racism in fandom and the world. We have messed up in the past and caused harm when it comes to issues of race. As we go forward into this new round, we’re working to center anti-racism more intentionally from the start. The initial steps we will be taking are detailed in the FAQ below.

FAQ

Where did this idea come from?

We wanted to fit in one more round of Voiceteam before next May, and as we looked at available times, this idea started to form. We’ve been picturing the daily new challenges as a kind of opening of presents to extend the winter holidays, and the creation of new fanworks in the second week as a fun and exciting way to launch the new year!

Sounds fun! But I don’t have a pre-made group and don’t like the idea of being matched to a group of total strangers. What can I do?

While Voiceteam is a great place to make new friends, we also know there are lots of reasons someone might not feel comfortable being thrown into a social situation with a group of strangers. To address this, we have something new this round called “sign-up buddies”! People who sign up in individual sign-ups can choose one sign-up buddy, who will be guaranteed to be on the same team with them. Please note that to keep matching from becoming overly complicated, sign-up buddies must be reciprocal, so if person A requests person B, person B must request person A (and not person C)!

What if I have one or more people I’d like to privately request to NOT be on a team with?

There’s a field at the end of the sign-up that says “Is there anything else you want us to know?” If there are any people you’d like to request to not be on a team with, please mention it there. This field is set to private, so nobody except the mods will see what you type there.

What is Discord?/Tell me more about how the Discord server is going to work.

Discord is a chat-based platform. Every server (like the Voiceteam server) can host multiple text and voice chat channels. Some of the channels will be open to the entire Voiceteam community and some will be visible only to members of your team.

Voiceteam players will be emailed an invitation to the Voiceteam Discord server on December 23rd. You can spend the first days saying hi and getting to know your team—we’ll provide some optional icebreaker questions you can answer for each other—and then the first list of challenges will be posted at midnight (GMT) on December 26th (as the clock is ticking over from the 25th).

I don’t live in GMT. How do I keep track of when drops and deadlines will happen each day?

We know this can be confusing! We will have a time zone converter set up in Discord in a prominent location to help players keep track of when the next drop or deadline is coming up.

Are there limits or requirements for crossposting creations I make for Voiceteam?

Nope! You may crosspost any works made for Voiceteam whenever and wherever you want. You can also choose to not crosspost at all and only share with the mods, or only share within the Voiceteam Discord. One reminder, though, is that since many Voiceteam works are collaborations, all collaborators should discuss and be on the same page about when/where a work will be crossposted.

What is Amnesty?

During Amnesty Day, you can turn in anything you didn’t submit on time, but the point values for all submissions will be half what they were during the main challenge.

What’s an example of what a challenge might look like?

You can find examples of past Voiceteam challenges here.

What plans does Voiceteam have in place to address racism within fandom and our community?

We have put in place content moderation rules—if a fanwork is flagged and found to be in violation of these rules, any points previously earned by the work will be removed and the work will be removed from our Voiceteam collection. We will also be hosting 3 discussions on the Discord across the span of Voiceteam Mystery Box where we will talk together about articles, posts, or other sources written by BIPOC about antiracist practice.

We have also been looking for areas where we can shift our work as mods away from exerting power over others in the community and towards equal power-sharing, with us taking the role of facilitators. As one small part of this, mods will not delete any words by players from our Discord unless those words violate our anti-harassment policy and their deletion is requested by the affected community members. In case of deletion, we will keep screencaps of the unedited conversation for accountability reasons.

We are continuing to reflect as a mod team about these topics and will also remain open to suggestions and feedback from members of our community for how to improve in this area.

How do I sign up?

Head to our sign-up post or directly to our sign-up form

I have more questions!

Hey there, I’m back after a bit of hiatus for grad school reasons and now it’s time for MOAR DATA. This analysis is a bit simpler than my previous analysis The Podfic-est Fandoms (on ao3), but still it was fun to look at and the overlap of Podfic and Spreadsheet fandom is large, so I figured I’d share. I wanted to investigate the feeling I was having that podfic is growing in participation lately (as in the past few years). To do this, I again turned to the tools from @toastystats​. The script only wanted to work in months for me, so I pulled the number of podfics posted to ao3 each month for the past 100 months, which takes us back to July 2012! (One could go back further, but this was enough for fun so I stopped there). Caveats: This is NUMBER of podfics. One could easily argue total length is a better measure of podfic output. However, getting even an approximation of that data based on length tags from ao3 would be grueling. I still think there is value in number of podfics as a measure of how active the fandom feels. Furthermore, this is ao3 data, and a lot of podfics are NOT on ao3 since it’s not actually a hosting site. Anyway here’s some graphs

Number of new podfics per year (2012 excluded as partial year)

Well there you have it folks,the numbers are going up!

Okay, actually its not that simple. I was honestly surprised by how flat 2013-2018 is. And many of you are looking at that 2020 bump (for a partial year no less!) and yelling DUH PANDEMIC?? but it is more nuanced than that. The influence of events is much more evident in the month to month data.

New podfics per month (July  2012- September 2020)

I’ve highlighted here the posting periods for some key events in the podfic calendar. The influence of Amplificathon (generally March-April, April is highlighted) is evident until its last year in 2016.  Meanwhile ITPE (Both December and January highlighted due to variation in when the masterlist posts) grows in influence over time, maxing at with the 2017 run. This is consistent with the numbers reported by the ITPE mods themselves. Finally, we see that actually 2020 may be mostly in line with a general upwards trend since early-mid 2019 and the absolute bonkers number of podfics is heavily influenced by the the contributions of @voiceteam​ in May. Now, whether we would have gone quite so wild during Voiceteam had it not been 2020, only time will tell, but that sure is a heck of a lot of podfic in one month folks.

Number of podfics per month/total podfics that year (2012, 2020 excluded)

This is just another way to see whether or not there are trends by month, except normalized to the total number of podfics that year.

Hi! My name’s Amanda, or @fishandchipsandvinegar on tumblr, or TheLordOfLaMancha on Archive of Our Own. (I have too many names).

And in response to @lesmispodficweek, I wanted to make some tutorials on how to edit and record using a freeware program called Audacity. (sorry they’re so close to podfic week!! D: )

If you don’t have Audacity installed on your computer, check out this post, which will explain everything you need to do before we get started (as well as how to install Audacity).

This will be Section 4: Multitrack 101. This is gonna be the advanced level so to speak. You need to have a completely edited and finished podfic before you start here.

If you need some help with that, you can investigate the three other tutorials:

RECORDING 101  |  PODFIC 101  |  EDITING 101

If you think you’re ready for the challenge, click the read more for Multitrack 101.

Hi! My name’s Amanda, or @fishandchipsandvinegar on tumblr, or TheLordOfLaMancha on Archive of Our Own. (I have too many names).

And in response to @lesmispodficweek, I wanted to make some tutorials on how to edit and record using a freeware program called Audacity. (sorry they’re so close to podfic week!! D: )

If you don’t have Audacity installed on your computer, check out this post, which will explain everything you need to do before we get started (as well as how to install Audacity).

Also, if you’re brand new to Audacity, you should check out Section 1: Recording 101 for a bit of a tutorial on how to use the program, as well as Section 2: Podfic 101 for some tips on reading in a way that sets us up to edit.

Editing is probably the most time intensive part of making a podfic. But doing it, and doing it right, makes you sound amazing and your podfic sound super professional. Once you get into the rhythm of it, you’ll find it goes relatively quick.

This is Section Three: Editing 101. It will have four parts:

1. Noise Removal 2. Editing 3. Pagebreaks (also known as timeskips or changes in POV) 4. Polishing

Click the read more to continue.

Hi! My name’s Amanda, or @fishandchipsandvinegar on tumblr, or TheLordOfLaMancha on Archive of Our Own. (I have too many names).

And in response to @lesmispodficweek, I wanted to make some tutorials on how to edit and record using a freeware program called Audacity. (sorry they’re so close to podfic week!! D: )

If you don’t have Audacity installed on your computer, check out this post, which will explain everything you need to do before we get started (as well as how to install Audacity).

Also, if you’re brand new to Audacity, you should check out Section 1: Recording 101 for a bit of a tutorial on how to use the program.

Before you actually set out to record your podfic, I suggest recording some short practice stuff so you get used to how this all works.

This is Section Two: Podfic 101. It will have four parts:

1. Setting up Noise Plates (we’ll need these for editing) 2. Recording an Intro 3. What to do when you make a mistake 4. Recording an Outro

At the end of the tutorial, I’ll link to a video of me recording something so you can get a play by play of what I explain here.

When you’re ready, click the read more to begin.

Hi! My name’s Amanda, or @fishandchipsandvinegar on tumblr, or TheLordOfLaMancha on Archive of Our Own. (I have too many names).

And in response to @lesmispodficweek, I wanted to make some tutorials on how to edit and record using a freeware program called Audacity. (sorry they’re so close to podfic week!! D: )

If you don’t have Audacity installed on your computer, check out this post, which will explain everything you need to do before we get started (as well as how to install Audacity).

Before you actually set out to record your podfic, I suggest recording some short practice stuff so you get used to how this all works.

This is Section One: Recording 101. It will have three parts:

1. Set Up 2. Recording 3. Saving

It’s going to be a really bare bones, basic sort of user guide with just the parts you need to record podfic.

Click the read more to begin.

A multivoice podfic of “the ballad of pots and pans” by 6th_magnitude, performed and produced for the @voiceteam​ event 2020. 

In which you can hear me sing, badly. Please listen to this amazing work of love and passion.

Hello and welcome to the inaugural Chromatic Characters Podfic Anthology, a collection of short podfics that center characters of color in different fandoms, which will be released as an anthology and as a collection of individual files.

This anthology, like it’s predecessor, the Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology, is a great place for new podficcers to get their start! It’s a low-pressure project, where you can be one of many voices in a collection. You can submit up to 5 podfics of stories of no more than 1500 words that center characters of color. You can find additional details at the link at the top!

We are also looking for technical betas (who will check for inconsistencies in volume, intro/outros, metadata etc.) and sensitivity betas who can commit to at least 2 hours of beta listening in September after submissions are in. If you’re interested, please contact the mods at ccpamods on Twitter or at gmail! 

It was a pleasant day to take a stroll through Hyde Park. Tourists ambled about in the vague manner beloved by hapless tour guides and pickpockets alike, and the sun was out for a change, warming the cool summer morning into the promised humidity of the afternoon.

Taking advantage of a sun-warmed spot out on the deck overlooking the water, Crowley sat reading the paper, a neglected cup of coffee left to gradually cool on the table. He was just about to reach for it in inject a little warmth back into it when he heard…

“Nanny?”

Crowley’s head jerked up as he twisted round awkwardly in his chair to find a familiar face staring at him through the crowd, the time-altered features torn somewhere between consternation and twitching on the verge of a grin. He stared.

“Warlock?” Crowley he demanded, reaching for his glasses and only just managing to resist the urge to pull them off. “Warlock?”

Read More…

Ever wanted to see an audiobook narrator in action? I’m featured at the Hear Now Festival on Youtube reading an excerpt from Joanne Wadsworth’s HER PIRATE PRINCE, in current production and coming soon to all major audiobook platforms!

Harry Potter writers and podficcers, if you’re interested in a collaborative challenge, we’d love to have you as part of this year’s pod_together!

pod_together is a multifandom, multimedia challenge where writers and podficcers create together—the writer creating text specifically intended for audio, and the podficcer creating the audio. 

Are you a writer or podficcer who wants to try something experimental in a supportive environment while making a new friend? Sign up as an individual, and we’ll find you a partner with compatible fandoms and interests to create with! Are you worried about being matched to someone you don’t know? Grab a friend and sign up as a group! Create your new work together! All fandoms and all ships are welcome. 

If you’d like to check out past pod_together works, you can find them here. The Rules for the challenge are here and the FAQ is here. Sign-ups are open until Saturday, June 13th. We’d love to see you there!

At one point - I’ll see if i can find the video - Marisha Ray talked about being booked for a session and her agent negotiating blind for what seemed like a pretty good amount. Marisha went in and found out that she was voicing random storm troopers in Star Wars Battlefront and that what had seemed like a fair deal turned out to be them almost completely ripping her off.  That’s one example of them not paying.

Another reason I’ve heard is so the actor isn’t really given a chance to say no to the gig without having to break a contract that they’d made before hand.

Actors and Actresses have been booked for gigs where they end up voicing prostitutes, racists, etc without being told prior to stepping into the booth. 

They were also striking to spread out screaming sessions so they didn’t scream for hours at a time until their throats bled. 

Both of these (and more :p) are available to stream or download on AO3! Let me know if you listen?

So can we pretend, sweetly, written by @redjewelsforeyes,  Geralt/fae!Jaskier, 17 minutes, rated Teen.

Toss a Coin to Your Archive!

the Organization for Transformative Works is an incredibly groundbreaking repository for creators, and the constant scrutiny it undergoes because ignorant children don’t understand that things cost money to maintain, and that their opinions do not represent everyone’s, is infuriating.  so infuriating, in fact, that i decided to rage-create. so there.

this was fun as shit to sing, ngl.

special thanks to Green Noize for providing the excellent instrumental track, and the only one i found that was actually fully faithful to Jaskier’s original. also thanks to alias for the inspiration to write these lyrics, and to my dear friend FilkAeris for instilling in me a fierce appreciation for filks in the first place.

parody lyrics by me.  “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher”  composed by Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, and sung by Joey Batey for the Netflix series The Witcher. which is awesome and you should definitely watch it if you like gritty medieval fantasy.  and boobs. and swearing. and hot guys wearing leather. and bards. definitely bards. 

and since we know bard is a combat class, this is my stand, and the hill i am prepared to die on.

👊 LONG LIVE THE ARCHIVE 👊  NO CENSORSHIP 👊

SUPPORT THE ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN!  MAKING PRISSY IDIOTS ANGRY IS JUST A HAPPY BYPRODUCT!