I posted The Thing in the Doghouse at AudioCD.com. It is the longest story yet. It was 3850 words and is just about 20 minutes long. The 5 minutes per thousand rule is holding. I added a stupid banjo riff to the front and back of the story. I have read that some sites prefer a professional production including musical intro. The original was 28 minutes and I knocked out the re-done sections. I make lots of mistakes, but I have to keep going. A few times I had to read a whole paragraph four times to get it right. You can’t do it perfectly so you have to do your best and edit out the flubs and coughs and cat noises.
I used a piece of software called “Groove Mechanic” in addition to Audacity to edit this piece. There was quite a bit of hiss from the computer fan and Groove Mechanic knocked it right out without adding any distortion to the voice. It may have added a slight echo effect – but that’s good. I downloaded the free demo version, but in 15 days I’ll have to pay for it. I’ll see if there is a free alternative.
I received an audio flash story from Jeffrey Lyons that has a great dynamite delivery. I will be putting it on the site as soon as Jeffrey writes his teaser.
I blogged on BlogsEye about how I’ve discovered a way to intercept the Apache Web Server read of an MP3 file and replace the content. I am using this now on the stories subdirectory of audiocd.com to track the downloads of the stories. There’s a raw log at http://www.audiocd.com/stories/data/stories.txt
Since I’ve added the code, it is obvious that the Juke riff tutorial is the most popular. The page has not received that many request. I include the file, the date, and the referrer. The files without a referrer are coming in through itunes software. I should include the user-agent header and then it would be more obvious.
My logs show that the stories are getting about 50 downloads each per week and that the tutorials are getting several hundred per week. As the stories age, this will go down.
I am paying for about 5 clicks per day from AdWords. I don’t know if this is helping or not.
I found out over the weekend that Acid Xpress from Sony is crippled and has a counter as to how many times you can use it. The hell with that! It got uninstalled immediately. Don’t waste you time downloading it. It is not that interesting. I will be using the WAV files that came with it, though, to sweeten the production of short stories. There were some nice computer synthesized effects that would be good for hard SF stories.
I agreed to do all of the work on AstoundingTales II – Flash. I will finance it and use my Indian printer. I will get Arthur’s recommendations and mail out notification to the authors. I need about 30-40 flash stories at 2+ pages each to make a book. The rest is for illustrations, fillers and I will put a few of our non-fiction articles into the book.
Primal Truck has already agreed to let us use his work for the cover.