Where should I host my Voice Over Demo? Can I upload it to Facebook?

I've gotten this question a couple times from friends and colleagues, and I've never had a great answer for folks.

From my pal Curtis:

Hey Juan, Do you know how I can upload my vo demo to my fb profile? Or is it best to link from another page to fb?

So here's the deal Curtis, we've never had great solutions for hosting audio online. You'd think in a world of streaming HD video, there's be SOME place we could semi-permanently host high quality streaming audio files like Youtube.

Recently, services like SoundCloud have become popular, and their bandwidth caps aren't horrible if you're focusing on something like your demos. The nice thing about SoundCloud is that it not only offers a handy place to upload the demo, and tools to embed the audio file on other sites, but it also makes it pretty easy to share your demo with a variety or services and social networks.

The tricky thing about directing traffic to web pages and social networking is you'll find people have very little patience. There's about zero attention span online. If someone finds you through Facebook they might not follow you to another link posted on your profile. Vice-versa if someone finds your web site, and you try to ship them off to Facebook or another service.

I'd recommend trying to make sure the basics of what you do are well represented individually on all services you use. If I find you on Facebook, I should be able to easily find your contact info, and listen to your demo, on Facebook. Ditto your own personal site.

But Facebook doesn't allow audio uploads do they? Well this is where all these streaming video sites might actually come in handy. Come up with a static image, a brand logo, something with your name on it, contact info, and convert that demo to a video file where it can live on Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook Video, etc.

Between SoundCloud and streaming video, you should have plenty of options for making sure that your marketing materials are easily accessible regardless of how someone might find you online.

For the rest of my VO audience, what services have you utilized for sharing your demo? Have I missed anything which might help people share high quality audio? Drop me a comment below!

Competition for Divshare? esnips gives Div a run!

So here's the dilemma.

I'm cheap.

There it is.

I need free file storage until this whole digital life of mine starts paying for itself (those of you clicking on ads and donating GAWD BLESS YOU). For the run of this blog, I've been trying to find easy and free ways to link or embed media. Most of what I produce for this site is audio (go figure), and all of the video is handled by other sites. I personally use Revver for the few vids I've made, but Youtube, 5Min, Funny or Die, MetaCafe, all have me covered for video content.

Audio, however, has been tricky. I haven't found a good solution, and sites that look like the holy-grail-youtube-for-audio (like Odeo) end up being to slow, or having odd limitations (like only linking to audio not storing it). For a while I considered just making everything a vid and uploading to the video sites, but those files get big, and I don't want to do yet another round of editing once I've already trimmed and cleaned a recording.

Enter the world of online file storage.
I started with sites like YouSendIt and MediaFire, to send files larger than 10MB to clients. As they evolved, it allowed me to add links to posts so people could download my stuff. Later I stumbled onto DivShare, which allowed me to embed a player. Now people could listen to the audio right from the blog, without having to download anything or navigate to another page to hear stuff.
The problem with DivShare is it can have odd periods of down time. It can be really slow to upload, and sometimes the player can get locked up. It's good for free, but I have a hard time relying on it as this blog gets bigger.

In this continuing search for free file storage, I've just stumbled onto a service called esnips. It's a lot like DivShare, allowing for file storage and embedded players, but it also has a community aspect. You tag your info, and people with similar interests and media can be exposed to your stuff.

I'm trying it out now. So far I don't love the players you can embed, but it seems pretty quick. Over the next couple weeks, I might start moving content over to esnips.

Both services offer 5GB of storage for free, and you can pay for more. That's a lot of space for audio, even uncompressed.
If you need free hosting for your demos, or to send audio to clients, I would seriously check out both Divshare and esnips.

Here's the esnips player:

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA

And the Divshare player:

Lifehacker Drops the BOMB on free MP3's

Holy cow!
This has to be one of the most comprehensive articles I've ever read on where to find free music.
Search engines, streaming sites, automation for importing, even tools to "broadcast" your own collection, and what the article lacks, is MORE than made up for in the comments.



It's a good time to be a music fan...

Check it out @ Lifehacker

News Sound Bites - First Batch of 2008

IGN gives Dragon Ball Z: Budokai for the Wii an A+ for voice and sound, about a C- overall. I'm currently watching the Frieza Saga just for kicks...

Voices.com has released an incredible "State of the Business" for Voice acting. Read it. Learn it. Live it.

CNet (via Reuters) wants you to host your own talk radio show, over the internet.

The voting is in, and Idolator has finally delivered us their worst album art of 2007.

Gamasutra has a great article on the challenges getting artists and coders to communicate when producing videogames.

The Voice of the London Tubes, Emma Clarke (known for telling passengers to "mind the gap"), was dropped after satirizing her Tube gig. The press surrounding the incident has boosted her profile, and she can now be heard on a popular Sat-Nav.

Yeah I decided to make the entire last story a link. What wanna fight about it?

How to Record Streaming Audio on The Internet

So if you need to record something that streams on line, you can patch in a mixer, making sure to route a few Aux channels, or you could check out FreeCorder.



It's a plugin for Firefox that gives you the ability to suck the audio down from any web item and save it as an MP3 or WAV. It also does a pretty good job of ignoring system sounds as it's tied to the browser not to the internal "what you hear" soundcard drivers.

Pretty sweet!

More write up @ DownloadSquad

OH! Did I mention that FreeCorder is ... FREE!