The other day, I was reading a poem by Victoria Stuart. I noticed on the page that she added a link so we could hear her reading the poem. Now, it could be that she has been doing that forever, but the other night was the first time I noticed.
“What a good idea”, I thought, and made a note that I should investigate one day. I know we can upload MP3 audio to our Media Library, but that seems a sure-fire way of eating up our allocated space.
Wednesday I finally did a bit of investigation. I quite quickly found a site, called SpeakPipe, which allowed me to create a free account. It has its restrictions – the longest any one recording can be is 90s, and the size of all my messages combined could not exceed 100MB. Those restrictions are a bit Apples and Oranges, but my estimate of disk usage was about 1MB/minute. So I’m hoping I get about 100 minutes of free storage. I’ll have to recycle stuff every few months, but I can live with those constraints.
So, as well as publishing my (poetry) contribution to Fandango’s prompt yesterday, I also spoke it into the mic and put a link to the audio into the post. (I only figured this out partway through the day, so the audio appeared several hours after the original post.) If you’re interested, I also recorded the greeting below:
I might do this for some of my future poems – 90s should be easily long enough for a poem.
So, you can go back and listen to the poem, instead of reading it, if the fancy takes you.
But I’m not finished yet. The site also had a “voicemail” function, where you can leave a voice message for me. I presume there is a 90s constraint there, too. So, if anybody has anything they want to say to me, go for it! (just so long as it is short). The link is in my Contact Form, or here. It asks you to supply a name and an email, but that’s just so I can see who sent it. You don’t need to login or anything.
Mister Bump 
Maybe. Dunno.
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No, I’m not sure either. For a start, it’ll only work for short pieces like poems. But I’ll see how it goes. I’ll leave the option on my contact form because we never know…
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You’re a technical wizard
And I am all ears
But my speaking voice
Would bore you to tears!
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It’s funny, I never much thought about it before, but certainly after the stroke I can tell a difference. It is softer and less well-defined, but I suppose, well-defined enough to be understood, is the main thing.
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Very true
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You could make your recording, choose an image, insert your audio, make a video and upload to Vimeo for free.
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I’ve heard of vimeo but don’t have an account. My other option is creating a video locally, then uploading it to YouTube. YouYube will not accept MP3 files as they are, pity. Was that you who left the message? I was unable to tell… might be a flaw with their site but all it said was it was from “Mister Bump”.
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Yes, a very short one. I had the urge to try it out. I’ll remember to say it’s me next time.
I use Vimeo for slightly longer videos, there is a weekly limit on size for free accounts so I never choose best quality. I don’t have a YouTube account.
Any videos of just a few seconds I upload direct to WP. I told myself if I run out of space on WP I’ll delete some of the old stuff or start to resize those old images.
For some silly reason I spent my first two years of blogging uploading full size images instead of resizing first.
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I’ve gone the other way with images – I tend to upload an image of 2000 x ?, just so people can click into the detail. But I don’t often upload new images any more. I’m very good at reusing what is already in the library. I learned to tag them so I can search for them.
I have a copy of Videostudio installed that I don’t think I ever opened, so I might try making an mp4 out of an mp3 later. I could share that, then. YouTube is pretty good, but quite complicated and quite rigid. I don’t really use it often enough to be proficient but it is great for uploading straight from a mobile phone – just so seamless. They do have a YouTube Premium but I think that largely removes ads while viewing vids.
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easy peasy. The video software was a bit complicated – I think I was using 0.01% of its functionality – but I might try that next time. I like the idea of somebody leaving a “voicemail”, though, so I might use both approaches.
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It’s the fun element isn’t it? You and I just enjoy the messing about to see what we can and cannot do.
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Absolutely, we never stop learning.
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