What we accept
Every recording is listened to before it goes into the library. Here is what gets through.
The material
Yes:
- Instruction manuals, warranty documents, assembly steps, service schedules.
- Minutes of meetings — parish councils, committees, residents' associations.
- Terms and conditions, privacy policies, insurance schedules, tax guidance.
- Timetables, stock lists, part catalogues, retention schedules, rainfall records.
- Descriptions of slow, uneventful processes and long, flat journeys.
- Anything factual, uniform, and with no story arc whatsoever.
No:
- Commercial audiobooks, or readings of anything you do not have the right to read.
- Anything with somebody's private information in it — real names, addresses, medical details.
- Music beds, sound effects, jingles, or an intro. There are no intros here.
- Anything designed to shock, upset, or wake somebody up. That includes the joke where it goes quiet and then it does not.
- Sales pitches, promotions, or a plug for your other project.
- Machine-read text that sounds like an error message. Synthetic voices are fine if they are pleasant; a clipped robotic reading is not restful.
The recording
- Longer than 2 min. Forty-five minutes and up is the sweet spot. An ending is an event, and events wake people.
- Even throughout. No dramatic pauses, no building to anything, no change of energy at the halfway mark.
- Level volume. Nothing should be more than a little louder than anything else. Normalise it and leave headroom.
- Quiet room. A little room tone is fine and even helps. A dog, a door, or a notification is not.
- MP3 is safest. M4A, WAV, OGG, Opus and FLAC also work. Up to 400 MB.
- 128 kbps is plenty. This is a voice reading a freezer manual; it does not need to be a master.
What gets a recording refused
Almost always one of four things: it is too short, something in it is startling, the material is not the contributor's to read, or the reading is too performed. If we refuse something we say which, and you can fix it and send it back through.
Taking something down
You can retire any recording of yours at any time from your own page. It comes out of the library immediately. Anything it has already earned stays in your balance.