The human voice
What is remote recording?
In a typical recording session about 20 years ago, a voice over would be booked into a recording studio. He or she would go into a voice booth and a recording engineer would sit in the studio’s control room. You as a client would also be in the control room and invited to give you input as to how you would like the recording to sound. You could do this during any point in the recording session.
Sometimes part of this operation has moved online. So you, as a client do not need to be physically present in the studio. You can dial in via an online platform and listen in and, in the same way as before, simply give your comments about what you are hearing as the recording session proceeds.
Session Link Pro
Session Link Pro is one of the main remote recording programmes used by most studios in Europe. It is cloud based software that you can access via a link on your computer, ie. you are merely accessing a piece of software on a cloud via a browser which allows you to listen in and talk to me.
If you click on a link that I would send to you, you get access to a pop-up window. You should see a screen with some recording levels going up and down, matching the levels of my voice. If you plug in a headset microphone, as well as hearing me, we’ll be able to talk with each other.
It functions through a browser such as Google Chrome. You would need a headset microphone and the system is currently free to use.
Skype, WhatsApp, Teams, Zoom:
If you’ve become used to using these for online meetings, I also use any of these when someone would like to listen in to a recording session.
Session Link pro allows for a higher bandwith of data which means you can normally hear a recording in very high quality. But, although the quality of audio stream will be lower with other services, you may be more familiar with the settings of Skype, WhatsApp, Teams or Zoom rather than Session Link pro.
What are the advantages of remote recording?
The advantages are that you can listen in to a recording in real time ie. as I am making the recording for you. As you are listening in, you can tell me if the sound you are hearing matches the recording you were thinking about.
You can also point out any important factors that need to be emphasized during the course of reading & recording your text. It can be helpful for me too in case there are any specialist terms that need to be pronounced in a certain way or names of people or products that are not so obvious for me. This way we can both be sure that the text I am reading and recording is correct.
Is there anything else I should know?
This setup is purely for listening in. I record your audio locally on my system so you don’t have to worry about recording anything. After the recording session is finished, I will send you the audio file that I have recorded (normally as a high quality wav file or in whichever format you choose).
