Happy New Year!

OK! So it's "that" time of year again...Resolution-time!

What interesting about the concept of "resolutions" is that they usually involve some sort of major sacrifice or herculean effort....losing weight, quitting smoking, getting to the gym more often...Resolutions, frankly have a bad rap because they usually DON'T involve efforts we really want to make ...but rather ones we feel we SHOULD make....and that's why they are so often NOT kept.

On the other hand, when it comes to my voiceover career - that I LOVE - I see resolutions not as bad, but as opportunities to play and expand and grow as a voice talent and a business owner...I WANT to do these :-) What a concept!

My friend John Florian over at VoiceOverXtra.com decided to put a call out to Voiceover talent to see who who would dare put their resolutions out there for all to see. You can check out Take One and Take Two (that's where I was quoted :-) and see what several of us have been brave enough to let everyone know about!

I figured I'd put mine here as well....Here goes!

MY VOICE-OVER NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

For advancing my VOICE ACTING abilities, I will:

1) Attend a Marice Tobias workshop*
2) Attend Dan O'Day's Creative Summit *
3) Attend VOICE 2010 (OK, so I'll be teaching there too: BONUS! :-)
4) Finish the French version of my website and get the word out about it for continued French work
5) Since travel seems to be a theme with me this year, I'll look for a European conference/meet-up/seminar to attend...and visit family while I'm there! :-)*



For sharpening and improving my BUSINESS and MARKETING skills, I will:

1) Keep picking Harlan Hogan and Elaine Clark's collective brains! :-)
2) Keep up on a regular basis with everything Peter O'Connell, Philip Banks and Bob Souer have to say!
3) Finish reading at LEAST these 4 books on my "Business" reading list:
- The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook by Jay Levinson and Seth Godin
- Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
- Positioning by Al Reis and Jack Trout
- Business Stripped Bare by Richard Branson
4) Attend another of Barbara Winter's seminars *
5) Catch up on watching Bob Fraser's "An Actor Works" DVDs

* Of course as you may know...these will depend on my securing "mom-coverage".....Anyone want to come over and watch my 92 year old wheelchair bound mom while I go out and play? :-)....gotta get working on that!

Now if you want another way to look at resolutions, check out the article by my friend and mentor Barbara Winter who wrote a great post about this very subject!
10 Things To Do Instead of Making Resolutions

So now that these are in writing I have an official excuse to play, because of course, I HAVE to make sure I keep these wonderful resolutions...because I WANT to!

Happy 2010!
(two thousand ten...or twenty ten...however you say it!)
...and may all your wishes for the year ahead come true!

Press Pound(ing headache) for those pesky telephony formats

When you’re a voice talent, as you progress in your chosen profession, you will probably find yourself doing more of one type of work than another:

Commercials,
Narrations,
Promos
….and for those of us that choose to: Telephony.

First things first: How do you to SAY “Telephony"
Click on the little flash player below to hear how to say the word correctly

Ahhh yes…telephony….that which is dreaded by the rest of humanity but loved by those of us that record for it! The “Press 1 for Customer Service” work.

Those of us that record these types of messages love them for one main reason: their repetition….it’s consistent work.

No, it’s not the highest paying VO work and most of it is non-union. But, once you start working in the telephony field and have your voice chosen by a client for their phone system…you’re in like Flynn. YOU have become the voice of that system. And updates happen a lot in telephony.

Now. There are two main ways to get into telephony:

1) The first way is to get on the roster of an IVR or MOH company who will in effect do the selling for you.

Oh…IVR? MOH? Liz’s what’s with all this alphabet soup?????

Relax...breathe...

IVR = Interactive Voice Response – These are the “Press 1, Press 2” type systems that require an interaction with you, a response from you, in order to get you to the right person or department.

MOH = Message on Hold – These are in effect sales and informational messages that clients have us record so that you know about their services or latest company happenings while you’re waiting on hold.

OK…so…

An IVR or MOH company will present their roster of talent to their clients and that client will (hopefully) choose you to record their messages. At this point the IVR/MOH company will send you a script, you record it, and you just send it back usually as an .mp3 or a .wav file. The IVR/MOH company will handle all the production.

In this case it’s pretty much like any other VO job most talents are used to.

2) The second way to get into telephony is to work with clients directly.

Here is where many voice talent’s eyes glaze over (or throats close up in fear).
There are so many different types of digital telephony formats out there and frankly unless you’re familiar with them, when clients start saying that they need a Dialogic 8bit, 8K Mu-Law .vox file…all that many talents hear is Ancient Etruscan.

I seem to have fallen into this niche and often get calls from other voice talents in a panic saying “My client says he needs a .vox file. What do I do?”

My first question is “What type of vox file?”
…at which point I get another panicked “There’s more than one type of vox file???

Yes.
One of the most important aspects of being successful in this part of the business is knowing what questions to ask.

You will NOT look stupid by asking these questions, you will look like you know what you’re doing, making sure that you give your client exactly the type of audio file he needs.

A little history:
Back in the old days….oh...like 15 years ago…before the advent and widespread use of .mp3 files, people – mostly large institutions like banks – discovered that it was A LOT cheaper to have calls routed by a computer than by a human.

One study back in the day found that if a human answered and routed a call, it could cost a company over $4.00 per call.
If the computer did it via an IVR system, it only cost the company $0.25 per call.

Yeah, a no-brainer in the eyes of the companies. And a boon for voiceover talent.

Many companies went IVR crazy with 6, 7, 8 even 9 options that people had to wade through with no way out.... and thus...voicemail jail was born.

Luckily things have changed a bit with "usability studies" and "Opt-out" features like pressing "0"for the operator...But back to history...

What these companies found was that all this audio was taking up a lot of space on the “primitive” servers of the time, so different audio file formats were created to take up less space. In the process, unfortunately, often trading audio quality for file size.

So:
Many different computer systems and many different file formats came to be.

And they don't play nicely together.
If you think MAC's & PC's don't get along:
With telephony, if you don’t provide the right file format for your client’s system it’ll sound like the snow on an old TV set.

Just like there are different types of:

• .wav files (mono, stereo, 48K, 44.1K, 16bit, 24bit….) and different types of
  
• .mp3 files (128K, 256, 96K…)
  
• there are also different types of telephony audio files.

You’ve got:

• Dialogic,
  
• OKI,
  
• InterVoice,
  
• Natural Microsystems,
  
• CCITT,
  
• NeXT/Sun…just to name a few.

Now, don’t panic.
You cannot, and you SHOULD not have to guess as to the correct format the client needs.

It is the client’s responsibility to tell you what they need.
Let me repeat that: It is the client’s responsibility to tell you what they need.

But frankly sometimes they don’t have a clue.

So what do you do? This is where you become your client's problem solver.
Basically, when a client says he needs a telephony file format you need to ask 3 questions:

1. What’s the format or sound family?
2. What’s the bit rate/sound type?
3. What’s the sampling rate?

If they don’t know the answer, you can tell them that they should be able to find out that information by either contacting

• their hardware vendor,
  
• their IT person or
• by actually looking at the instruction book that came with the system!

The other option is to Google the name of their hardware and see if you can find the information yourself. That's up to you. If the client is big enough, it might make you look really good!

But again, unless you give them the right file type, it just won’t play, and they’ll blame you for that! Better to get the answer upfront than by trial and error.

But let’s say a client says: “I need a .vox file?”

What’s the format or Sound family?
The format is “.vox” – 9 times out of 10 that will be a Dialogic .vox file so you can at least pretty much go with that assumption.

What’s the bit rate/sound type?
Is it ADPCM or Mu-Law (also pronounced simply “U-Law” – comes from the Greek)
ADPCM is always 4bit. Mu-Law is always 8bit

What’s the sampling rate?
6000 Hz (6K), 8000 Hz (8K)? Another rate?

With Dialogic for example the 2 most common are:
4bit 6K ADPCM and 8bit 8K Mu-Law

But the bottom line is that with so many formats out there, you can never assume anything.
Just ask.

So how do you create all these formats?

Here’s the bad news:
Most professional audio programs that we use for voiceover do NOT convert to telephony formats.

They will convert to some.
SoundForge, for example, can convert to 4bit ADPCM .vox and 8bit 8K CCITT mu-Law .wav, but not .vox.

There is pretty much only one program out there that will convert to all of them: VoxStudio. It was invented by a company in Belgium and has pretty much cornered the market on telephony file conversion. Once you get used to the way to format a voiceover script and import it into the software, it’s a powerful and useful program.

However, at over $550 (399 Euros) it’s not a cheap program, and it only works on the PC platform. I would only suggest you get it if you know you’ll be doing a lot of telephony work directly for clients.

So,

If your eyes haven’t completely glazed over and turned to mush yet, take a break, read over this post a few more times and if you still have questions feel free to email me. I’ll be happy to help!

Like I said, it’s not a glamorous part of the voiceover biz, but it certainly is one of the most consistent.

Peace!

Software Review: Word2Wav

Those of us that are full-time voice talent do a lot of different types of work. TV and radio commercials, E-learning, and a lot of Message on hold and Interactive voice response work.

Many of these types of VO work require that individual files be created....MANY individual files......hundreds of files with names like #sys_Press_Pound_Twice_then7.wav

Renaming a few of these files manually is fine, but then you’re looking at hundreds or even thousands of audio files with names like that, it can be a daunting task.

“Dammit, Jim I’m a Voice Talent, not an editor!” (Sorry....my original-Star-Trek geek is coming out! ;-)

Up until now there really was only one piece of software that was up to the task: VoxStudio. It’s a great program, but at over $500 (399€) it’s pricey. And unless you do A LOT of telephony work it might not be worth the expense.

Enter: Word-2-WAV (http://www.word2wav.com/index.htmlindex.html). Hereafter referred to as W2

I spent most of the month of December 2008 working with the developer of W2, Hervé Chain (RV to his friends! ;-), giving him suggestions as to what I - as a voice talent - would want in a program like this. With each upgrade/revision that he made to the program, I told him what was working and what wasn’t.

I have to say that when it comes to customer service, Hervé gets an A+.
YES! The French can be nice, helpful and fun to work with!

Whenever I had an issue or a question, he was right there with an answer and was open to all of my suggestions. Personally, it was a real blast to see suggestions that you make as a user, actually appear in a product!

At $295 it is a powerful program that is really well suited to what we do as voice talent:

• We get scripts in either Word Table .doc format or Excel spreadsheets – W2 imports scripts in both formats.

• We record many files at once – W2 can import up to 500 file names and associated prompts/paragraphs at a time in batches. This means that if you have 2000 files to record it imports the first 500 file names/prompt scripts, you record them and then it automatically imports the next 500. No need for YOU to manually cut-up the script. This was a major upgrade for the first version.

• We need to provide separate files with individual names – W2 names the files as you record them based on the imported recording script.

• We don’t want to name files manually! Did I mention that W2 names the files as you record them?


W2 has few other features that may seem minor to an outsider, but are a real plus in my book:

• You can adjust the font size within W2, no need to play with text wrapping and cells in the original excel spreadsheet.


• You can type corrections/additions to the script within W2. This is great if a missing word or misspelling is messing up your recording flow! You can then export that corrected script from W2



• It has a counter – so if you’re recording 500 files you can see how many files you’ve recorded already. (You can thank yours truly for that little addition!)

• You can see the content of more than one cell - If you record foreign language scripts like I do, you can either have the translation imported into the same cell you are recording from or have it come up as a separate “comment” – this is very handy for some phrases that can be said different ways depending on the context.

• You can choose from several bit/sampling rates to record in.


• You can record an alternate take on the fly and W2 will create a separate audio file, naming that file with the original file’s name and “ALT” after it.

Keep in mind, this is NOT an audio editing program.

In other words, once the files are recorded you must use your own preferred editing program (Audition, Audacity, ProTools, SoundForge, etc) to edit & cleanup the files.

You may need to get used to the fact that you don’t see a meter as your recording, but as voice talent, we’re pretty consistent, so after recording a file for level, you can be pretty sure that your levels will be fine.

A Tip: If you’re importing a WORD .doc, make sure there are no “page breaks” in the script. W2 will see the first one as the end of the script (ask me how I know! ;-)

You can download a fully functional trial version of Word-2-WAV from the W2 website: http://www.word2wav.com/index.html

The trial version will expire after 30 days but you’ll be able to put it through all its paces in that time. And as I said earlier, Hervé is very open to suggestions & comments.

In the interest of full disclosure: After all the input I gave him, but before this review was published, Hervé gave me a permanent licensed version of W2. I will tell you though that I would have bought the program anyway. It is well worth it.

I am now off to record a 9000 word French e-learning narration that needs to be cut up into 401 separate files.

You know what software I’ll be using!

Peace!

Pay it back by paying it forward

I’ve said it before in this blog, but I’ll say it again, there really is no competition in VO. Either you’re right for as gig, or your not. And I love that.

It leads to a wonderful sense of community within this business that I don’t think exists in any other. Those of us that work at our VO dream everyday know this and live it. How?

By helping each other out whenever we can.

I’ll take this past Tuesday as an example.

I get an email from a client who was looking to have a script translated and recorded into French.
So I gave them the name of a wonderful French translator I trust implicitly, Guylaine Laperriere.

Now, my client was going to submit my voice (thank you!) but they also said their client was leaning toward booking a male talent for this particular job so they needed a French male sample as well. So, I gave them the name of a French male talent I also trust. Full disclosure: he’s my brother André, but that’s really beside the point. He’s a male French talent and that’s what they asked for.

So what happens?

Guylaine booked the translation gig.
André booked the VO gig.

And what did I get from this?….think before you answer….
.
.
.
I got a very happy client who remembers that I helped them out.
And I have two friends who got work they may not have gotten otherwise!

My father used to tell me: “When someone does you a favor, you may not be able to pay them back directly, but you can do it indirectly by helping someone else who asks you for help.” And this was WAY before the move Pay It Forward came out!

As an example, this week alone I was forwarded a lead from non-other than the wonderful Bob Souer, and got amazing advice from DB Cooper, Kara Edwards, Moe Egan and Pat Fraley.

I have been on the receiving end of so many favors from VO friends & colleagues that I consider it essential to return those favors by helping out those that I can.

Call it Karma, call it the right thing to do, call it the whatever you want, but to me it just makes me smile!

When is YOUR New Year?

Well...here we go again!

A brand new calendar year! (What's the alternative right?)

Is this a fresh start for you? Or just another day....

For me, frankly, it's a little of both.

When I was a kid, summer started at my best friend's birthday the first week of July and ended with my birthday the last week of August.

The New Year was always symbolized by September's start of the new school year. I loved getting all the new notebooks, and pens and backpacks, not to mention all the new books! I have always been an avid reader and I loved cracking open all those brand new books...except the Math ones...but that's another story! ;-)

January 1st just brought the end of the Christmas vacation break!

Through the years I have marked other milestone dates that brought new beginnings of sorts:

- October 19th: the day I got married
- April 10th: when me moved into our house
- November 17th: when my mother had her stroke - which started a whole new way of life for all of us
- May 24th: when I got "downsized" and was released to follow my dreams.

Yes, January 1st is the day I put up the new calendar and look back at how close I came to my calendar year financial goals. But it's less about "resolutions" for me, as it is about filing and organizing paperwork for taxes!

That's not to say that it's not a fresh start of sorts, but for me, other dates hold more meaning.

Whatever January 1st and the new year mean to you, I do hope this calendar year brings new hope and renewal to the world.

I hope it brings you health, happiness and prosperity!

And may 2009 be whatever you wish it to be...and more!