My Audiobook Project
This is my First Book builder project of which i wanted to do something memorable and easy to do. I will discuss about how I got started and why I chose what I chose. Then I will show the process of how I rebuilt it and the problems that I encountered along the way.
Getting Started
For my first Audio Book Builder Project, I decided to go with something that would not take long and yet still have something that I could go back and reflect on. The Book I chose to do this project on is called “Harry And The Chamber of Secrets.” I decided to go with this one because there were others in my Class that were talking about it as one of the example. However, as the examples were being descussed, I started to think and realize that I have never really read through the whole series of those books by J. K. Rowling. Therefore I went with Book number two in the harry Potter series.
Looking back in my own past, I know that I have seen all of the Harry Potter movies. Some say that reading books are better than watching the movies. In a way they are right, but a movie can give off a whole new and different perspective on the book itself, even if it is not true to the written images it impresses into the mind of the reader. In some cases the movies are better for a great story to be told, also to those who do not like to read as much and yet love entertainment. that is true but I am unfortunately not into reading and the First book of this series was read to me. On the other hand, I also realize that i have never heard of, or worked with audio builder before. I think that Audiobook Builder is a great program to personalize and sort out what you don’t like into how you want it to be. Here is how I did mine.
The Chapter Art Process
After choosing this book and listening to it all the way through, I find myself coming up to what images I wanted to have for my art selections that can match the chapters. Then, I reviewed what audiobook builder does and its features upon the content that is already there. The first part was my creation of cover art and chapter art. I used Adobe Illustrator for all of my art work, with the help of quite the number of images I could pull from online. Through these image examples shown below, I am able to provide the processes of how I recreated the chapters by my artistic abilities. A lot of the images or figures were traced from the resourced images that I found online and then colored to perfection by using the Abode Illustrator. By tracing the images I am able to create my own version of the book in a cartoon like way.
Creating The DataBase
I looked at the content of the audio book as I downloaded it from the Library. I wrote down all the information that it listed on the box that the CD’s came in, then from itunes, windows media player, and from the audible app on my phone. I even looked up other information that it may list online about this book. I did a comparison to make sure that no detail was left out so that I can put it into the audiobook builder that I was currently working on. As Shown below I put it all on an excel spreadsheet so that it is all organized before going back and putting it into the audiobook. The description however, was a bit long and each cell has only a certain amount of space to show up. I tried to shorten it the best that I could in order to make it fit, therefore this was the best result that I could come up with for the whole desption to show up in a better font size.
The Problems I Faced
The first problem I encountered was from making tables figuring out where things go in the audiobook builder app. Which was easy to learn just by clicking around and seeing what is in the app itself. Then After downloading the Audio files I found that each one had its own file and labeled as numbers or letters of the alphabet. When looking at how things were organized on the CD, it was almost organized, but I found that each track had its own folder and I decided to clean that up a bit by putting all the chapters into one folder per chapter. The next problem was trying to name them, I found that you can only name the folder but not rename the tracks name or number.
Saving my work an progress a long the way I could be able to come back to it and continue on using a lab at UVU to do this project. The next time that I came back I found that chapter 3 was missing. Therefore, I went back and did what I could to put chapter 3 back in to the audio files of audiobook builder. This did not work out as planned. So I had to start over and get all the chapters and audio back by re-downloading the audio data. The next thing that I encountered was that I had to save each time I added a jpeg or a png file from my art work into the picture slot. This was a shame seeing that every time I tried to add one then go to the next chapter to add one to that and on to the next… the pictures would not stay in place nor would the artwork show up. So I found it a hastle trying to save every time I added something more to the project.
Testing it out
The next part was the testing stage, with some help I was able to make sure that the book could be finished and uploaded as a remade audio book. I was happy that the art work turned out to be a success. I really liked how the data scrolls on the screen of even my phone that I tested it from. However, as the finishing project on the computer I found that as I looked up the chapters on what was playing, it was chapter 3 that was at the bottom and that is not where I had it or organized it in the first place. On the phone side of things, everything seemed to be just fine. Now I can listen to it on my phone as a way to be proud that I remade the meta-data and the art work of a book that I gained interest in but never really took the chance to read when I was young.
That is how I was able to find all the problems and make it work out in the end. I am very happy for the way that it turned out. This is how I built my first Audio Book with a little help from other sources. Here is the link to view my art work and revision of the project in M4B format (shown as an mp3).
