Some notes on the audiobook recording of the STORM handbook

The audiobook of Reclaiming Revolution is complete.

First off, I do not, can not, and will not profit monetarily off of this audiobook, and anybody else who downloads it should not either. It is for educational value only.

Second, part of my final preparations for the audiobook was to re-record several of the first few sections. It's very important to me that people be able to have this available to learn from it, and due to the fact that I just took up recording one day, without any prior experience, I have had a lot of learning to do myself. So the first few sections did not sound very good, but they do now.

Third, portions of the STORM Manifesto reflect a 'work in progress' type recording. Audio recording is not nearly as easy as you would think up front, or it just wasn't for me and I had to train myself to do it. Either way, the first few sections sounded awful as I was speaking too slowly. When you get to section 8 there is a small difference, that is where the original recordings began to get better and I did not feel the need to re-record anything beyond that. Also, for large portions of the recording I was able to keep 'puffs' low despite not having a puff filter.(which I got my hands on later) As I have continually improved my recording ability, I could just keep recording and recording and recording in a never ending loop the exact same audiobook over and over, but each time with diminishing returns on quality. The later recordings and the first several sections represent a puff-free recording, at the point when I acquired a puff filter.

I feel that this recording as it stands is very good and has a great educational value, despite a small handful of puffs(put your hand an inch away from your mouth and say the word puff. Feel that air?) being in the recording, and a handful of small things that only I as the recorder would even likely notice. (The puffs not excessively loud and are not distracting - and I'm fairly picky about audiobooks. Not only do I want something decent, but I still haven't yet gotten used to the idea of listening to myself. So I'm very critical here)

Finally, I re-exported all of the files after stabilizing the audio a bit. This makes my voice more consistent in each individual audio track. And the meta-data has been changed as well. The entire audiobook is numbered via the actual book's own page numbers, which was the closest I could get to keeping everything in context instead of having all of the workgroups and other grey boxes bunched up at the end of the book. This is done to keep the audio files all in line in your media player. You'll understand what I mean when you download the files and look at the chapter numbers. And now for the files:

You can get the text version of the STORM handbook here.

Scribd searchable file

The audiobook recording is here.