Voice Over Experts · 5:57am Oct 31st, 2015
I know some of you do or would like to do audio readings. If you're way more serious about voice acting than I am, check out Voice Over Experts, the professionally-produced podcast for professional voice actors, by voices.com. It's free, and it may have more information on voice-over and voice acting than all the other tubes of the interwebs combined.
There are a lot of episodes, but they're each only about 8 minutes long. Beware that it's aimed at professionals. It isn't hard to understand, but it is a lot of information.
They're now on episode 188, Understanding The Role of Vowels and Consonants in Speech. Some earlier episodes:
VOE002- Coloring Words.mp3
VOE008- Sounding Clean While Speaking Naturally.mp3
VOE020- How To Become a Cartoon Character.mp3
VOE023- Auditioning In Your Home Recording Studio.mp3
VOE025- What 100 Clients Told Me.mp3
VOE030- Learning Voice Over as a Whole.mp3
VOE031- Recording Software for Voice Actors.mp3
VOE040- Finding and Developing Character Voices.mp3
VOE041- Put First Things First! The Newcomer's Training.mp3
VOE044- The Layers of Your Voice.mp3
VOE057- Finding Your Authentic Voice.mp3
VOE059- VO Genres and Styles.mp3
VOE062- Giving Depth to Words.mp3
VOE063- Focusing on Physical Issues to Improve Vocal Performance.mp3
VOE072- Get The Point! A Lesson in Interpreting Punctuation.mp3
VOE076- Voice-Over Therapy.mp3
VOE077- Taking Your Voice From 2nd Place To 1st.mp3
VOE084- Microphone Technique for Voice Actors.mp3
VOE116- 12 Skills Voice Over Talent Should Master.mp3
VOE119- Improving Your Improv.mp3
VOE120- How Sincerity, Smiling and Movement Affects Voice Over Performances.mp3
VOE122- The First 15 Seconds.mp3
VOE129- Clarifying a Character Voice.mp3
VOE134- Getting Used To Your Own Voice By Listening To Yourself Objectively.mp3
VOE135- 4 Things You Do Naturally With Your Voice That Shape A Brilliant Read.mp3
VOE139- Creating Evocative, Unique and Developed Characters.mp3
VOE140- Tips For Those Exploring Voice Acting.mp3
VOE141- Ten Ways to Place Your Character Voices.mp3
VOE143- Sincerity, Smile, and Physicality.mp3
VOE145- What Your Voice Over Agent Should Be Doing.mp3
VOE148- How to Interpret Punctuation.mp3
(Their podcasts homepage also has a blog on current events in the industry, and a set of tutorials on how to do a podcast. I don’t know whether they’re good. The links at the top of the page go back to the parent site, voices.com, which is a place to advertise or search for jobs in voice acting. You can listen to demo clips from the 41,000 other people you’ll be competing with for the 82 open job listings on the site. The top ones are scary good. They also have another podcast, Vox Talk, for industry advice and news.)
If you use Firefox, you can use the plugin DownThemAll! to download the last 10 podcasts. All the rest are accessible only from the archive page. Each one is hidden behind a separate HTML page.
I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE DO THAT WITH FILES THEY WANT YOU TO DOWNLOAD.
Because I come up against this scenario a lot, I wrote a simple Perl web spider to download all the .mp3 files under podcasts.voices.com/voiceoverexperts. That's 1.58G of mp3.
But Roger's bash script (from the comments) is much better:
path="https://podcasts.voices.com/voiceoverexperts/podcasts/"
fn="Voice_Over_Experts_Episode_%02d.mp3"
for i in {1..188}; do wget $(printf "$path$fn" $i); sleep 5; done
If you don't have Unix, you can download Cygwin from https://cygwin.com and very easily install it. It will create a shortcut to open a terminal window, and that terminal runs bash when you start it. That means you just copy-past the code above into that window.
What isn't obvious is how to paste into a Cygwin terminal window. You can left-click on the thing in the upper-left corner, then Options->Mouse, then set right click to Paste. Then you copy from your browser however you normally do that, and paste into the Cygwin window by first moving your cursor over that window (just selecting the window via alt-tab won't work), then right-clicking.
I'd bet well over half of these would be applicable to anybody who spends more than an hour a day on the telephone or making presentations. After all, communicating effectively by voice is an enormous part of our business environment.
These are really fun. I wish my voice was dynamic - so far my critics say it's "nasal", and "critical". Is critical an actual thing in VA? I mean, could I voice an anime teacher in translation? Or a tsundere despot? The mind boggles.
Episode 189: It's bad to be hoarse. Bad hoarse.
I don't know. I'm not really trying.
Interesting. They have an RSS feed but with only whole 15 episodes mostly about unions and career advice, rather than things that might help me sound less low-rent on a podcast.
The mp3's have a (seemingly) consistent naming convention, so this should work:
path="https://podcasts.voices.com/voiceoverexperts/podcasts/" fn="Voice_Over_Experts_Episode_%02d.mp3" for i in {1..188}; do wget $(printf "$path$fn" $i); doneThis is a fantastic resource, Bad Horse! Thanks!
Though I don't think you need to worry about people downloading stuff from FiMfiction. The FiMficarchive already does that for them:
https://www.fimfiction.net/user/Fimfarchive
They crawl FiMfiction every three months and archive every story. So if anyone wants all of FimFiction, they should just download that zip file of everything.
3509537 Nice. I feel stupid now. I believe that's using the bash shell, for anyone else reading this. I'd change that to
path="https://podcasts.voices.com/voiceoverexperts/podcasts/" fn="Voice_Over_Experts_Episode_%02d.mp3" for i in {1..188}; do wget $(printf "$path$fn" $i); sleep 5; done3509647 This script would download all of fimfiction. Stories, blogs, comment pages. Even the pages that don't exist. Like, go to the top of this page. Click on 'Followers'. It says "Viewing 1 - 48 of 1,194 users". There are 25 pages of followers there, all generated dynamically from the fimfiction database. Or click on Library -> Favourites. If your account is set to 'Full View', it will say "Viewing 10 of 90 stories". There are 9 pages of favourites.
3509502 You might be looking at Vox Talk, their other podcast. I got confused: if you go to https://podcasts.voices.com/, they advertise the Vox Talk and Voice Over Experts podcasts; but if you go to https://voices.com/, then click on 'Resources' at the bottom of the page, they advertise the Vox Daily blog and the Voice Over Experts podcast.