Poll: Which form of fanfiction-as-mp3 do you prefer?

[auronlu]

I've been toying with the idea of recording Love Her and Despair as a book on tape.

Once upon a time, I was an amateur bard performing songs and stories. But now, asthma and sinusitis have given me a nasal and breathless delivery. I never could manage reading dialog and action very well; I was better at a folktale delivery where one didn't have to indicate change of speaker.

Option 2 is to use NaturalReader software to create Mp3s artificially. The pronunciation editor is flaky-- rather than let me type phonics, I have to try various misspellings and hope it gets one of them right-- and sometimes it gets the emphasis in a word or sentence incorrect. But on the whole, it does a remarkably good job.

Either way, I have to do a certain amount of editing and processing to get a passable recording, snipping out my stammers and pops or beating on Heather's wonky pronunciations and pacing to the extent that I can.

So here's recordings for Chapter 44 of Love Her and Despair, broken into two chunks since it's a long chapter:

Live recording: Part One | Part Two
Text-to-Speech: Part One | Part Two

[Poll #1651551]

Comments

[muggy-mountain.livejournal.com]

Your voice, like a thousand times over. You've got intonations the computer can't replicate. Just in that sample, I heard undertones of emotion in the dialogue that I didn't detect when I read it. Not for the fault of the writing, but there definitely exists an appeal in listening to it.